The Princess' Ear
by androsjanicek
Summary: In another ultra-secret case, Holmes and Watson are called to an unnamed foreign land to establish that a woman's deathbed allegation is false, and her daughter was not switched with a princess in their infancy. The men use deduction and the science of their day to solve the crime, but a rift between Holmes and Watson may be a happy circumstance.
1. Chapter 1

A little more than a year after Bruno's exit, a case appeared upon our horizon that required the most serious oaths of secrecy that Holmes and I may ever have had cause to swear. That is not to say that we hadn't been occupied with many other escapades in that time. The months had gone by, with things attaining a kind of normalcy at 221 B Baker Street. My friend was less selective about his clientele, but still, we had confronted mysteries that took all of Holmes' ingenuity to solve.

We'd been receiving more government assignments, and while Holmes was right in saying that the state of European politics was worsening, I also saw the hand of Mycroft. Whatever his brother's motivations for taking such an active interest in Sherlock's career, we could both agree that a busy detective was preferable to one who drugged himself to a stupor every so often with his new vice, hashish.

If I am able to write about the case at all, it is only because of the advice of a friend, who suggested how I might keep the story intact while altering the details so that none of the European royal houses should fall as a result.

I can only tell you about a certain royal family, which we will call the house of Varga, although of course the name has been changed, as have all others in this tale. The English noble titles are used for ease of reference. Since there are nearly a dozen monarchies in various levels of ascendancy throughout Europe, you will understand that this event could have happened anywhere from Scandinavia to Iberia and anywhere else across the rest of the European land-mass.

One day I came back from a busy turn at my surgery and found Holmes pacing anxiously in our parlor. "Watson! At last!" he thrust an envelope at me. It was a fine quality paper but when I turned it over the juxtaposition of the state crest and a crablike penmanship took me aback.

"Yes, Mycroft has written in his official capacity. We've been summoned."

"We?" I said, eyeing the sideboard beckoning to me with its cold joint and bread.

"Well, you've been summoned, but I have been told my services are also expected. All the letter said was, 'The services of a doctor are required. Speak to no one until you are called for.'"

The few lines on the page did sound intriguing. I hastily made a sandwich while Holmes told me what didn't appear on the page.

"There will be travel abroad, as this matter does not involve our realm, but Mycroft has his tentacles everywhere. His reputation as a disinterested judge led a very upset foreign power to ask him for advice. It is a matter so sensitive that my name could not even be put to paper."

I grimaced. "You mean I'm choking down my supper to be your alibi?"

He looked at me, genuinely aggrieved. "No, my dear friend. We need a doctor. Absolutely essential to the case."

As he let me finish my rushed repast, he mused, "I would have so liked to have your privileged position in this case, Watson, but medicine is one of those professions that simply can't be faked. Everyone knows what it is like to be looked at by a medical man, touched by a doctor." Holmes shook his head. "You don't need a detective to pick out an imposter sawbones."

"What exactly will they expect of me?" I inquired.

"You merely have to go over the body of a certain princess inch by inch and determine if she is, indeed, a princess."

The bread got stuck in my throat. "Pardon?"

"You'll go over all her male and female relatives the same way, if that will be any more comfortable." My friend gave a malicious half-smile at my discomfort. "You, Doctor, will be working with a scientist eminent for his study of human heritage. Together you are to determine whether there is sufficient evidence that the young woman known as Princess Anna was born to her parents, the King and Queen of a certain foreign land."

"I'd rather I were to be just an alibi," I sputtered. "There can be no more thankless task than to unmask some poor girl as not being what she's always been taught she is. And where will you be in all of this?"

"Do not worry, Watson. I will be listening to all your consultations, but discreetly. The royal family has decided that this matter will be handled respectfully for everyone involved. A great conglomeration of people may not gather to peer at the noble form. I will listen from an adjoining room."

A look of displeasure had crossed his face at the prospect. "Luckily, you and I understand each other very well, and thus, our cooperation will be perfect. What's more, I have even packed for you. Come see, everything you could want to meet this land's royal stock is already in your cases."

As much as I would have preferred to pack for myself, I had to admit: Holmes had foreseen a number of eventualities that I had not regarding weather and decorum. We were considering the insruments and lenses he'd prepared when the bell rang.

"There wouldn't be time for you to assemble your own things, you see," he said when we were in the carriage soon after. "We'll be crossing somewhat later, but there is a stop to make."

Holmes hailed a porter to take our luggage and then I followed him to the train station's dusty back office, which had been taken over by Mycroft.

"Dear brother," he said without inflection to Sherlock with scarcely a glance. Me, I didn't merit such recognition. "I am glad to see that you have been taking more exercise, though I would think an upright sport like fencing would be preferable to your Eastern practices, under the circumstances."

Watching the two brothers greet each other was usually amusing, but today my nerves were on edge. "What is it you're not telling us about this situation, Mycroft? I don't like walking into a land where I know neither the language nor the politics."

Holmes looked totally complacent. "I've told you everything I know, Doctor, and my dear brother either can't or won't tell more. I suspect it's the former, as he is exhibiting signs of unusual tension—Mycroft usually can't be brought to speak aloud anything of my declared affections. He does not usually go so far as to speak of what going a strenuous round at my baritsu club might mean 'under the circumstances.'"

This reference to Holmes' romantic predilections was very unusual coming from the older brother. "You both have your roles to play," Mycroft said in a final tone. "I simply wished to see if you were ready."

He opened the door and was soon lost in the train station crowd.

"Did he think you were mentally unfit?" I asked, trying to understand that unusual exchange.

"I think he rather hoped I was," Holmes smiled. "Come, Watson. This is a most promising case."

We spent the train trip to Dover looking through the couple volumes about heredity that we'd managed to fit in our luggage. There were certain traits that science had determined were likely to be passed down in families: handedness, the shape of the earlobe, eye color, formation of the thumb could at least be measured easily enough. Height could be skewed by any number of factors such as nutrition or childhood illnesses, and beyond that there were a staggering number of characteristics that might help us prove Princess Anna belonged among the royals.

If it were a mere academic question, working with an expert on heredity would be fascinating. "I could never do harm to the princess, or the other young lady, Maria, with a mere theory as justification," I remarked.

Holmes made a calming gesture. "I have also been contracted, Watson, because what science may be unable to prove, a calm and lucid gaze may discern. You will do an immense service by your mere presence, I am sure."

He turned out to be right. The genetic expert was Dr. Petrus Ghjuvan—and if I were to make a list of such experts, his name would surely be at the top. I had never met the man and had heard he was somewhat retiring. It turned out that he had a hunchback, and the man who must surely be in his fifties was also very nearsighted. He wore thick glasses perched atop a large, hooked nose, and these lenses distorted his coarse, craggy features even further. He had an enormous lantern jaw and bristly salt-and-pepper hair with pronounced brows.

The eyes under his brows were penetrating, but with a distinct placidity that appeared not to register to most people at all. I wondered whether he began studying heredity to understand why he had been so cursed by that force in every way. But his dealings with us were very fair, and the scientist took the gracious view that I was there in the examinations to help him where his eyesight would have missed something. He ignored the fact that all the female relations we examined shrank from him as from a fiend.

It was a great relief to find that the expert had prepared his own questionnaires that I was to administer while he sat quietly by my side unless something caught his interest. I would say aloud all the dimensions of the body I measured for his benefit as well as Holmes', who listened to every trait I noted by benefit of a false panel, making notes of any questions and passing them through a small aperture between the rooms.

After the first few examinations, the scientist and I developed that special rapport that happens between two practitioners thrown together. I developed a sense of what might be interesting to him and thus he could stay unobtrusively in a corner until he approached for one quick look with those eyes trapped behind their glass. Even with this vision impairment, he caught me out nearly every time with an unusual rib formation or distinct webbing between the fingers.

And so the long sessions were not as daunting as I had feared they would be. Holmes was right that a sensitive presence helped calm the ladies and, I suspect, some of the men unaccustomed to such scrutiny—which I imagine was an affront to their lineage, rather than their physical privacy.

Of course, my understanding of their language was attained only from a doctor's phrase-book on the train. With the family and staff, who were comfortable in French, our group used that language. Thankfully, Dr. Ghjuvan was somewhat conversant in the land's tongue and could lead the sessions with Maria's family, who had little French.

He took to Holmes instantly as one intellect to another, with no shame possible between them. They were having a lightning-fast conversation in French within five minutes of their introduction. Together, the two gifted men came up with the idea of obtaining photographs of each of the members of the royal family, and using some transfer-process I'd never heard of to make prints upon translucent paper. In such a way they had these thin sheets with a person's nose, or eyes or mouth printed on them. Then, they layered all specimens on top of each other, so that if there was a preponderance of long, thin mouths, say, this would be what came through most strongly on the paper.

Holmes examined the faces in the royal portrait room for more data, and with that astonishing, unused artistic talent of his, made a few fair renderings of the features in the stiff, cracked paintings.

"Sometimes I think you should have been an artist," I joked.

"Sometimes I am," was the terse reply.

This one reference to Sherlock Holmes' other life in the residence he'd shared with Bruno couldn't be commented upon, because he and Ghjuvan were busy creating a composite "House of Vargas" set of eyes, noses and mouths. Then they did the same for the composite we developed for the other girl's family, which we shall call the House of Gunther.

At this point, the possible princess, Maria, was finally brought to us from where she was being kept in seclusion until the veracity of her claim was determined.

The reader may feel I am telling the story all in the wrong order, but I only wish to give an accurate account of how the events unfolded for us. While we labored to prove Princess Anna was indeed the real princess, the Royal Secretary, a man we shall call Mr. Abel, shared the reason for our visit in bits and pieces. It was a queer way to begin a case that brought three men from other lands, but Abel said the royal family wished to see the investigation underway without waiting for burdensome discussions that might prejudice our work.

Through the reticence of the secretary, our only true contact at the palace, I gathered that the royals hoped for physiological proof of the princess' origins, rather than a world-class detective performing a true investigation with free access to their lives. Holmes' impatience with these strictures was well-controlled, at least on the surface, and I knew his keen eye was making ample use of every visit we made to the royal estate.

Luckily, Dr. Ghjuvon was thoroughly enjoying his acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his peculiar methods, and he was an invaluable help in collecting and translating news reports to supplement discreet inquiries he made on Holmes' behalf in the town. What follows is the picture we slowly put together.

The queen had nine living children, with the youngest, Princess Anna, recently married at 20. When Anna was an infant, there was a grand celebration at the castle in honor of the sovereign's 25th year on the throne. The queen herself had been ill, and this event marked her first public appearance in some time. She was scarcely able to do more than greet her subjects from a seated position during the extended festivities, which culminated in a dinner and dance held in the castle's formal gardens for select subjects and foreign dignitaries.

The princess' nursemaid, let us call her Delia, had been in charge of the little girl's care almost since birth. She and the other servants caring for the smallest children of the palace and those of a few guests had been stationed all day in a tent near the feast and the orchestra. After night fell, this coterie of nurses had gone to the edge of the tent and then outside to watch the fireworks display celebrating the monarch who was watching from her chair on a dais some distance away.

Suddenly, a cry went up among the guests in their formal dresses and frock coats. It wasn't unusual for a few of the firecrackers to not attain their full height, pyrotechnics being something less than an exact science. This time, however, the errant incendiary devices scudded very low over the crowd, and a few partially burned embers scattered over the party. As the guests ran for cover, servants scurried to protect the queen, who was unable to walk without help, and the guards rushed to ascertain that this was not an assassination attempt with the noise of gunfire cleverly masked by the fireworks. No one noticed at first that the cloth of the children's pavilion was on fire.

The cheery explosions continued in the carefully planned chain reaction that was to culminate in a blazing likeness of the queen. Several small fires were burning on the grounds, but none blazing faster than the one in the children's tent. Several servants and a few male guests fought their way from the palace through the mad rush of people trying to escape the chaos to ascertain that the cribs were empty, and found that they were still inhabited by children. With the blowing bits of flaming cloth in the air, these brave souls rescued the babies—fortunately with no major injuries.

Princess Anna received a severe burn on the edge of her left ear that could be seen as a ragged gap around the mid-to-upper third of her outer cartilage. Covered with the right hairstyle, one would scarcely notice the defect. Indeed, the asymmetrical or ear-covering hairstyles Anna wore since childhood had given rise to a similar fashion among the ladies of that realm.

For safety reasons, the palace grounds had been quickly emptied and maintained that way for days while the military ascertained that no one was trying to attack their monarch. What everyone at the palace was understandably too preoccupied to notice on that fateful night of the jubilee was that another child received a burn on her left ear. The baby Maria, born only a few weeks after Anna, had been one of the children snatched up by one of the guests at the party and carried away from danger.

The queen might have been physically weak, but she was quite aware that several things had been mishandled during the mishap. The monarch was enraged when she found that the nurse Delia had, at first, obeyed instinct and run away from her charge in the tent. Delia had turned back to rescue baby Anna, but it was already too late to fight against the tide of humanity escaping from the palace grounds.

The nurse was dismissed on the spot. Baby Maria had been quickly claimed by her parents, minor aristocrats who had attained some favor at court.

The two girls had gone on to live their own lives, the princess, among her royal brothers and sisters, and Maria as the only child of her less well-placed family. Neither had reason to think of the other's existence, although chances are they did coincide from time to time in high society. Had they been similarly coiffed and attired, one would certainly have been struck by the remarkable resemblance between the two young women.

A few weeks ago, a little more than 20 years after the fire, Maria Gunther's mother died after a short illness. Greta Gunther had been widowed a few years before, and the mother and daughter were decently provided for by the husband's will.

When Greta asked for pen and paper to make a last bequest, her daughter thought it was merely some small financial matter, and thought little of giving her mother some privacy to settle her affairs.

Young Anna was surprised when a servant entered the room later and said she'd found her mother had expired, but she was utterly astonished by the content of Mrs. Gunther's message.

The page between the dead woman's fingers told a singular tale. It was a deathbed confession to the effect that all these years, she'd suspected that the child rescued from the fire and returned to her was not her own, but the Princess Anna instead.

Greta Gunther claimed she was too selfish to share her presentiments with anyone, because she knew it would mean the child she'd raised as her own would be taken from her and brought to live in the castle as the princess she truly was. Only the qualms of a dying woman led her to advise her daughter of the noble life she merited.

This incredible revelation was backed by the servant herself, Marta, who claimed to have been in attendance as one of the servants at the celebration, and who had gathered some of Greta's concerns through the years.

At first, the royals had taken a dim view of such a preposterous claim, which Miss Maria felt compelled to turn over to the authorities. Both she and Marta, who had first discovered the letter, were taken into the strictest custody in an attempt to control any rumors. And so far, not a mention had appeared in the papers, according to Ghjuvon.

The desire for secrecy was so extreme that our several requests for at least a copy of the letter took a long time to be fulfilled, for not even the police chief had been allowed to retain this message for fear that it would be circulated to enemies of state as evidence of a royalty that was not as royal as it claimed to be. Finally, this copy was placed in our hands:

"My dearest Maria. I am leaving you with less than I would have liked, but I cannot leave you with less than you deserve. I write this only now because I could not bear to give you up, once I realized what the truth would cost me. Please forgive me, my only child, for preferring my own comfort over yours by holding back your origins."

We were not allowed to part with it, but my friend has a magnificent memory, and on the way back to our quarters he repeated the letter, word for word, so that he could muse the dead woman's thoughts and I could commit a version into my notes.

It was hard to believe that so few words threatened the status of one of Europe's oldest houses, and even more so that a handful of foreigners should be among the select few who were aware of it.

Holmes felt quite sure that none of the palace servants understood what was happening or even why we were there, having been told only that we were visiting doctors assuring the royal family of their complete and abiding health.

The circumstances of the fire and all the coincidences between the two women's physiognomies were striking, but not conclusive. Nevertheless, the difficulty in proving the girls' heritage was very worrying to the House of Vargas, as a mote of less purity that had gotten mixed in with the carefully preserved purity of the royal stock would upset any aristocratic line. The princess's husband, and particularly any future issue, would be greatly affected by such a demotion.

We three spent some time familiarizing ourselves with each ear. "Anna's burn is a few centimeters higher than Maria's, and Maria is missing just a fraction less tissue, but one could scarcely cause two injuries on purpose that were as similar," Holmes said. "Dr. Watson, you believe that Maria's mark is not of recent vintage, some ploy to substitute for the princess?"

"No," I said emphatically, confident of my military exposure to all sorts of scars. "These are both very old wounds, well-healed, though of course I couldn't give an exact date to them."

"I agree," said Ghjuvon. "We could say that Greta Gunther knew exactly what Princess Anna's mark looked like, disfigured her daughter in precisely the right way and planned all along to claim her own girl was the true princess, but that seems most unlikely."

"Indeed, Doctor, if someone was of such cold blood to injure her daughter in hopes of gaining a fortune or a higher rank in society, she would hardly have waited to release this news until she was breathing her last breath," Holmes said.

We compiled all our data very carefully, but any assertion about the identity of the queen's youngest daughter would be on very shaky ground.

"Our group has used every clue science might give us, and I may say we have even exceeded what little is known about hereditary traits." Holmes said with a nod to Ghjuvon when we had a meeting with Secretary Abel. "It is impossible to say for certain which girl rightfully belongs in the royal family."

The royal secretary looked crestfallen. "Is there another expert we should call in?"

"Dr. Ghjuvan knows far beyond any trifling academic paper I would have read on the subject," Holmes said with great respect.

"And I cannot say for sure," the scientist completed. Ghjuvon showed the superimposed transfers showing the features of the Vargas and Gunther families. "The Vargas mouth is wider, the Gunther eyes, somewhat closer together. But the two girls both have the wide-set eyes of the royal line."

Then the scientist brought out the statistical tables we'd labored over. "Both families share certain similarities. The spatulate thumb and attached earlobes are exhibited by almost every family member examined from both sides," Dr. Ghjuvan said. "There are traits unusual enough that would have helped me give a certain amount of probability one girl was from a particular lineage—red hair, for instance, left-handedness, or even better, the rare blood condition exhibited by the late Prince Leo."

The queen's next-to-youngest child, Leo, had suffered from hemophilia, a fact that I was aware of before starting the case. The young man had recently expired from a freak accident from which his body could never recover.

"We at the palace call it a vulnerability, Dr. Ghjuvan, rather than a condition," the secretary said coldly.

"Naturally. A thousand pardons." Ghjuvon continued, "These unusual characteristics are easier to track through a family history. But the princess and Maria have none of these. They are both healthy girls of fair hair and skin, both in the medium-dark blonde range, with Anna's more curly, and blue eyes of nearly identical color, Maria is two inches taller. Anna is more athletic, or at least, she had more opportunity to ride here at the royal manor, and thus her muscle development is slightly better. But given a girl with fewer opportunities for sport, Maria is more muscular than most girls of her class and opportunity."

"I believe she likes riding when she has the chance," I contributed from the conversation I'd started with the quasi-prisoner, who was so terrified from her long ordeal she was shaking on the table. "And she is a fair shot with a bow and arrow, I hear. She loved traipsing about the country and trying her hand with birds and small game. Not a very ladylike activity, in her mother's eyes, but when she could get away she would go shooting. I understand that only her fiancé's insistence has made her give up the sport."

"Maria's broad, high cheekbones are very much in line with the Vargas family composite, while the Gunthers' faces tend to be thinner, " Holmes continued, bringing the images forward. "But then, both young ladies possess figures more indicative of the Gunther family, as opposed to the sparser frames of the Vargas line."

"There is nothing that is different about the girls?" the secretary asked in frustration.

"Yes, naturally, they have lived different lives," I said. "Anna has a long scar on her leg, the result of a riding incident that occurred when she was 10 and was witnessed by a dozen people. Maria has a few round, shallow scars on her right arm that happened so long ago she can't remember the cause. But since the confusion would have happened in infancy, later injuries are of little help."

And so the three of us showed Mr. Abel why all of our labor couldn't possibly be conclusive enough to depose a princess and make another girl take her place. Or, conversely, prove young Maria as complicit in a dangerous fraud that would merit a long penal sentence.

"This is very bad," the secretary wrung his hands. "Even if we do nothing, to make princess Anna live her life under a cloud of suspicion among her very family would be a harsh fate. She is a fine girl and a great comfort to her mother. The legality of her marriage might even be questioned, since the banns occurred under her identity as the true princess! Oh, the sorrows that could await!"

"Yes, I hear that she is the queen's favorite out of all the children, but then, Princess Anna was the youngest, so perhaps that is natural," Holmes remarked in a soothing tone. "Leaving the science of heredity with the most able Dr. Ghjuvan for a moment, Dr. Watson accompanied me in a different sort of investigation."

I brought out the photographs we'd asked the royal photographer to take of two girls' defective ears and nothing else. "Out of curiosity, Mr. Secretary, which is the picture of the princess' ear?" my friend asked.

The secretary gave an impatient gesture as we moved the identically posed photographs picturing only the ear closer to him. He studied them for some time and said with no great decisiveness, "It's the one on the right, of course. I've known Anna since she was a tiny child."

"Would you swear to it?" Holmes pressed.

"Well, I am relatively sure," Abel amended. "Is it Maria's instead?"

"You ask me rather than state for certain," the detective said. "Let us leave the answer for a moment. Please consider these photographs from a slightly different angle."

And so we showed the man several more photographs. We had made a small dot of ink in one corner of the images depicting Maria's ear to aid our casual glance—well, my casual glance. Holmes felt that the princess' ear was slightly smaller, and Ghjuvon was remarkably quick at distinguishing the whorls of a person's ear using criteria I had only begun to understand.

"Mr. Secretary, you correctly identified the princess' ear only two out of five tries," Holmes proclaimed. "Please do not feel discouraged. Everyone in the royal household and among Maria's relations had widely varying answers, no doubt complicated by the fact that the ladies did everything to obscure this small disfigurement. In the last pair of pictures, this ear wasn't Anna's or Maria's. It was a photograph of an artist's model made up to look as if she had a tear in her cartilage. And yet you chose this one as Princess Anna."

The man flushed. "Mr. Holmes, it is most irregular to offer up an artist's strumpet to possibly be the princess."

"All this proves, Mr. Abel, is that a slight deformity seen every day is scarcely seen. We can neither depend on the many talents of Dr. Ghjuvan, with whom I would nevertheless like to stay in consultation, nor can we rely on the observations of the people that have known these girls all their lives."

Holmes paused. "I will not molest the queen for her recollections of the first several months of her daughter's life because she was often ill, as I understand."

"Yes, she had childbed fever and then came down with scarlet fever and had a long recovery. The girl had to be segregated from her as a precaution."

The lanky form began to pace as if we were theorizing in our parlor. "Therefore, a baby who was plucked out of harm's way with the other infants while the conflagration was dealt with—she could have been any child, because her mother was not yet recovered from her unfortunate maladies to the point that she had spent much time with Anna. Not many were in a position to know the minute differences from two nearly identical children. I heard you say there was a cap embroidered with the royal crest, that was all, but it,. like many other trappings, were lost in the confusion. There would have been blood upon the princess' gown, and presumably Maria's, and no one had any reason to examine this gown for a monogram before it was discarded."

"Mr. Holmes, you speak as though the young princess was brought up with little attention." Mr. Abel appeared desirous of ending this, the longest interview yet about the past. "The girl's nurse, Delia, lavished attention upon her. Princess Anna had every consideration, just like her brothers and sisters."

"And yet for our purposes, Mr. Secretary, this nurse might as well not have existed because she was summarily dismissed when it was discovered that the baby was left alone during the melee."

"Yes," the secretary agreed. "Delia and several other servants were dismissed because of their lack of composure in an emergency. And we cannot question her about these events because she has since died."

"The next day, a new nurse was contracted, who had no reason to suspect that the child placed in her arms was anything but the royal child. That the two girls were, in fact, switched in infancy is not an improbable set of events, Mr. Secretary," Holmes concluded.

The royal secretary rubbed his face. "The position it would put us in—to accept some stranger from the lowest branches of the nobility into the bosom of the royal family." My friend shot me a significant glance—Mr. Abel was part of a hereditary class of palace servants, and he evidently considered himself nearly a member of the Vargas clan. If only he had been present in the garden on that fateful day, but unfortunately he was assigned to serve in the house and then had then been sent to assist the soldiers in any defensive maneuvers they intended.

We turned our attention back to the man's worries. "Yes, Princess Anna has been the queen's favorite all this time, and then Her Highness would be forced to acknowledge that her dearest child was not even of her blood. Making a bond with her real daughter would be very difficult for her, and for all involved," Holmes acknowledged. "But please trust me, Mr. Abel, when I say that this investigation is just beginning."

"It is?" the secretary gasped. "There is more you can do?"

"I can do as much as I am allowed, sir. It is essential that I be granted an audience with a less hysterical Miss Maria. Dr. Watson has a remedy he thinks may calm her while leaving the lady with all her faculties intact. But first, will it become possible for me to speak to Princess Anna's brothers and sisters? Whilst I am in the same room this time," my friend specified with some tension in his voice. "These will be very short interviews in the location where the princes and princesses feel most comfortable. Dr. Watson will be there, as a familiar face."

"The queen's children spoke very highly of your professional bearing, Dr. Watson," Mr. Abel said with a nod. Poor Dr. Ghjuvon was not thanked. "What will you be asking them, Mr. Holmes, if I might inquire?"

"About that night when the girls could have been switched, of course. The night of the fire."

"But it's been over 20 years," Abel protested. "Some of them were very small children."

"Their memories would hopefully be supplemented by the household records from that time," came the detective's smooth rejoinder. "If I can find out how the event was supplied, who served it, I can get a better sense of how many people were in attendance, what their movements might have been, and thus, the chances of the girls being switched when no one was looking—"

"Yes, I understand," the secretary said, all business. "The effort of assembling whatever old records might still exist would be a small price to pay if we can put this nasty allegation to rest." Mr. Abel rang a bell. "I will ask for permission to open the records and for you to speak to the family, but I should warn you, Mr. Holmes, things take some time to arrange in the palace."

"Many thanks for your cooperation," Holmes replied. "You can leave the two oldest boys, Robert and James, off the list because I understand they were away at school on that night. I recall you said that two of the children's spouses were also at the jubilee, being distant relations. I should like to speak to them, and to any servants who were in attendance, as well."

Once a footman had come to lead us out, we saw the secretary bustle away full of purpose.

"I hope you have comfortable rooms," Dr. Ghjuvan remarked when the palace gates had closed behind us. "From what I hear, this queen's bureaucracy is notoriously convoluted."

He recommended several sights to see in the town, and the next day I accompanied him gladly, knowing that it would be easier to move about with someone who could get by in the language.

Holmes met us for dinner after a day at his own pursuits. Afterwards he confided to me that he was merely walking through the exclusive suburban area where Maria had spent part of her life, trying to understand what might set apart a girl from less elegant, although still affluent, surroundings.


	2. Chapter 2

At last, we were called to the palace for our audience with Princess Anna's siblings.

"The royal family has graciously arranged to be here all at the same time, so that their ordeal is not unduly prolonged," the officious secretary said.

The warning to Holmes not to abuse their noble patience was met with a curt nod.

"We shall treat them all with every delicacy," I said to soften the impression.

The members of the house of Vargas did somewhat better recalling the night of the fire than they had done on the ears. Most agreed that the blaze had started around the middle point of the fireworks display, though there was not much agreement on which direction the wind was blowing the cinders. Some said from the stream, which would have been east. Others said from the pavilion, which would have been north. One of the children insisted that a more serious fire had broken out among the seats placed for the guests near the fountain, while another said that it had happened in an archway.

"Can you recall anyone else being injured?" Holmes then asked.

Here, there was more agreement, as most of the royal children agreed that they'd seen a pock-mark on a maid for years before she retired. And a footman, one of the people who had been there to pass the drinks, he had put out one of the small fires and had gotten a mark on his hand for his troubles.

"But there were visitors from all over, Mr. Holmes. If you could find all of them, I'm sure some of them might have been caught by an unlucky bit of coal," said one of the middle daughters, Princess Beatrice.

"I am sure you are right, my lady," Holmes conceded.

None of this seemed very concrete to me, with two girls' positions in the balance. Holmes caught my concerned expression as we bowed our way out of our last meeting.

"Never fear, Watson, I have great hopes for the household records. Though I am afraid there is a bit of dull work in our future."

What he was referring to was the astonishing amount of records kept on the royal household. Mr. Abel arranged everything for us in an elegant library. We found that in the year 1866, the year of the jubilee, it was possible to determine how much the palace spent on thread. How many horses there were on the royal stables and their pedigrees. The amount of wine and other spirits to a very significant degree of accuracy. For that year alone, several large journals and receipt-books were stacked before us.

Holmes laughed at my dismay. "Cheer up, Watson. It's better organized than our own archives. We'll find our way around very quickly."

At first I thought my friend was right. He set me looking for anything related to celebration, or any similar celebration, particularly the firework purveyors. He sat across the table in the sumptuous library with the intention of getting a better idea of the running of the household and the personnel for the three previous and three following years. Any sections he judged to have references to a big party he marked so that I could make exact notations in my little book, and likewise, I passed anything interesting to him.

"Well, Watson, shall I ring for some of the excellent royal sherry? I have learned quite a few things about the palace and its workings."

"I could use a little refreshment," I said wearily. "But we will have to come back another day. I couldn't find the fireworks master in any of the years I examined."

There were some details about the jubilee. "I did not see anything having to do with the wine, but perhaps since it was a very important affair they brought in special wine. And musicians, I found no mention of them, although everyone mentioned the musicians playing because there was dancing."

"Yes there was an engraving of that in the newspaper. Dancing on the lawn or some such thing. What isn't to be found is at least as important as what we can find."

Holmes slammed his book shut and rang the bell.

"Thank you for your assistance. We will return tomorrow to avail of it again," he told the footman.

And we did. It took a couple of days of hard work, much of which I completed myself, I must say. In the end, I determined that the record-keeping was very good, if a bit spotty. But there was no mention of any firework display at any time. And the royal family clearly agreed that it was used on this occasion. Ghjuvon had been visiting newspaper archives during this time, and he agreed that there were newspaper reports of fireworks at the palace on this day and at other events as well.

This information Holmes relayed to me when he rescued me after another long day before the household books. "I hope you're taking me for a decent meal and several drinks," I said irritably. My good manners notwithstanding, I am far less comfortable moving in high circles than my companion, and all those visits from lackeys and the royal secretary to check on my progress had my nerves on edge.

"Ah, dear, patient Watson," he clapped me on the shoulder. "I promise you something even better."

This something better came in the form of a small shop in a tradesman's district that was half falling down. The owner came to the door in the company of Ghjuvon, and he greeted Holmes familiarly. "Dr. Watson, please meet my new friend, a fireworks purveyor."

Ghjuvon duly translated the greeting. For our purposes, we will call the tall, rangy man with gray hair and piercing blue eyes Andre. The proprietor beckoned us to follow.

"He says to please pardon the quarters," Dr. Ghjuvon translated. "They had an explosion."

The man held up his hands. He was missing parts of three fingers.

"Apparently that is a hazard of the profession," Holmes said drily. "Did you find any record of a merchant of his name on the palace record-books for any year?" he asked me.

"No, but if you condemned me to that library for several months I might," was my reply. "There were scanty records of the fancy events. I assumed that with all the fuss people forgot to keep track."

Dr. Ghjuvon explained what I said to the merchant. The man looked shocked and began gesticulating, pointing to the hole in the front wall that was now covered by slats of wood.

"Mr. Andre used to have a display in his window showing pictures of great events where he'd served. He insists he provided the spectacle at several palace celebrations," our translator said.

The man led us to a back building separated from the small storefront by a narrow wooden path raised above the general mud. He paused us in the doorway and began a tirade with much gesticulation.

We listened politely while he gave us a thoroughly incomprehensible explanation of his work. My eyes wandered as I considered how this spotless workspace with its measurement devices and sealed containers of what were presumably chemicals might compare to a similar establishment in England.

Poor Ghjuvon was left to carry the conversation. Holmes looked intently at the man and nodded every once in awhile.

When we finally got away, Holmes asked the scientist to bring us to a discreet restaurant where our conversation would be unlikely to be understood. The scientist smiled happily and led us to a small place —scarcely more than a few tables separated by curtains —where we were treated like royalty. We put ourselves in our friend's hands as far as the menu was concerned and we were right to do so,. The unpronounceable dishes were warm and hearty in a way that the affected hotel fare or royal food we'd been subsisting on was not.

"This reminds me of Afghanistan," I said contentedly.

"The local cuisine has many influences," Ghjuvon explained, and then proceeded to share some of his experiences from his far-flung travels. While we refreshed ourselves, Holmes ate in near-silence.

"I think you can safely leave off your perusal of the palace books, Watson," he finally said. I gave a sigh of relief and had another sip of the spicy local liquor. "As for me, I need no more proof that Mr. Andre was the preferred supplier of fireworks displays for the royal family."

"I was not looking forward to another day of the same," I admitted. "But you are sure?"

"You saw his workshop. We weren't even allowed to set foot inside. It was at least as clean as your surgery, doctor."

"It was not as clean as my surgery," I remarked to Ghjuvon.

"And it was much cleaner than Mr. Alexander's shop. I shudder that we set foot inside it," Dr. Ghjuvon put in. He saw our blank faces. "That's what Andre was going on about. Not a cobweb. Not a thread may be left on the floor or there would be something to burn should there be an ignition."

"You mean we could have gone up in smoke while talking to Mr. Alexander?" Holmes found this very amusing.

I asked, "Who isthis Alexander?"

"The rival fireworks maker Dr. Ghjuvon and I saw this morning. Every profession has at least two contenders, you must admit, Watson. Think of two rival costermongers singing their wares."

Now the he mentioned it, I realized Holmes was correct. Even the most specialized thief or expert always had someone else to compare themselves to.

"This Mr. Alexander boasted about how he'd been charged with the fireworks at one of the prince's birthdays in 1868, and two smaller parties in the next few years."

"But what about the jubilee?" I asked immediately.

"Exactly, Watson. If he had been responsible for that event, he should surely have mentioned it. How many fancy affairs have you come across in your reading?"

I grimaced. "In the ten years I've read so far, perhaps eight birthdays for which they spared no expense, a few more state holidays."

"And the remembrance this nation holds every year on the date of the armistice," Ghjuvon added. "The hundredth anniversary of that war's ending would have warranted a grand celebration."

"Which again, Alexander did not mention," Holmes pointed out. "Dr. Ghjuvon was kind enough to take note of the dates that Mr. Andre claimed to have supplied fireworks to the castle."

I groaned at the list Holmes pushed towards me, "But again, it is not worth our while to prove the matter at this point. Our Mr. Andre comported himself like a proud expert in his field. For that reason alone, I would accept him as the most likely fireworks purveyor to the queen, over the much more slipshod operation housed the next street over at Alexander's. They're the only two in the city. The only other alternative would be to invite some foreign firm. Letting a foreigner set off explosions around your monarch, no, that would be the least desirable alternative."

"Yes, the queen's representative would have preferred Mr. Andre, who runs a fine shop," the scientist agreed. "It's a wonder the explosion was in his place and not the other."

"And that it was in the front room, not the warehouse," Holmes added. "What did he say was normally in that space?"

"A few chairs, a desk. It's a place where someone would consult with him while he planned their party. And some record-books, he said, so he could show designs for people to choose from."

"Well, there is only one thing to do," Holmes waved for the check. "To rest, after a fine day's work. Ghjuvon, you have been indispensable."

I cleared my throat.

"And the good doctor has demonstrated the patience of a saint before his dry reading. You don't mind lending your linguistic skills tomorrow, Dr. Ghjuvon?"

"Not at all. This is most entertaining."

We saw the rounded shadow disappear into the darkness.

"Holmes, we would really be in a tight spot without his translating services."

"Most true. We could purchase someone's help for a day like today, but tomorrow it would be out of the question."

"What are we doing tomorrow?" I asked, suddenly exhausted.

"We're visiting Maria."

If it seems as though I have neglected this central figure thus far in my tale, it is because she was totally overwhelmed by this turn her life had taken and refused to speak to anyone.

One day, she was preparing for her wedding, and the next, she was being accused of crimes against the state. I suspected that the authorities were doing little to reassure her, and thus, she was being kept in seclusion.

Holmes and I had discussed the possibility that some convenient "accident" might befall the girl, thereby solving all of the Vargas' problems. I was pressing him to make good on our demands to see the girl was alive and relatively well when the visitation order came through.

I made no presumption of Maria's innocence, mind you. There was obviously a very large possibility that she was pulling a stunt for either notoriety or money. Or pure malice. But this possible criminal was being treated as a proven criminal, as we quickly gathered from the bleak stone building where she was being housed deep in the country.

Together, our party of three jounced in a royal carriage until we were brought to rest before this seldom-used royal property with a significant guard.

It turned out that Dr. Ghjuvon's linguistic skills were mostly not needed, once he convinced her to try the tincture I had brought with me, a mild herbal calmative, no more. The poor child looked thinner than the last time I saw her, evidently due to fear of accepting the state's rations. The girl accepted a glass after I had consumed a few drops myself, and I watched her pinched features relax somewhat.

Our brief conversation when I examined her had been in whispered French, and after she calmed down she was able to converse admirably in that language. I will admit that Miss Maria directed all of her answers to me, no matter who questioned her. Holmes could not induce the guard at the door to step further away, and so he accepted the girl's insistence upon ignoring everyone in the room besides "Monsieur le Docteur."

"Miss Maria, please accept that our party of foreign experts can only help your situation, but that may only occur if you speak frankly to us," Holmes began.

"I have done nothing! I wish that my mother had never written that letter! I don't want to be a princess! My fiancé has sent no word to me, and I do not know if he has broken off with me," the prisoner sobbed.

I made some soothing noises and Holmes continued. "Yes, the letter. That is most important for freeing you from this place, Mademoiselle. No one has produced the letter written in your mother's own hand for me to read, and thus I implore you to cast your mind back. What did it say?"

Maria accepted my handkerchief and composed herself. It said something like (here she switched to her native tongue, pausing to let Ghjuvon translate):

"'My dearest Maria. I am leaving you with less than I would have liked—or some reference to our financial situation, which was slightly reduced after my father's death—but I cannot leave you with less than you deserve.'

"'I write this only now because I could not bear to give you up, once I realized what the truth would cost me. Please forgive me, my only child, for preferring my own comfort over yours by holding back your origins.' And there the pen had run across the page and fallen out of her hand."

It was almost exactly the text with which we had been furnished.

"Surely she mentioned Princess Anna and the royal family, else you would not have been spirited away to this place," Holmes coaxed.

Maria said to me, "No, Doctor, she did not write anything more. But it was everything Nurse Marta said, and above all, the photograph she clutched in her left hand. Mother always kept it by her bedside, and I thought it was because I was pictured next to Princess Anna. And we did look most frightfully alike," she ended on a wail.

Our group exchanged a significant glance. There had never been mention of a photograph.

"You are helping us a great deal, Miss Maria," I said. "Please tell us anything you can about this photograph. You say you had seen it many times throughout your life?"

"Yes," she sniffled. "My family is not as noble as it could be, but we are connected in several ways to the queen's family as well as her late husband's. I was invited to the palace a few times, more than a few, because there were so few little girls born in the noble class at almost exactly the same time as the Princess." She gulped. "I remember playing with her very well, and my mother said I was asked back because not everyone could make friends with her."

She darted a frightened look at the guard, who appeared to have no French.

"I think you are quite safe, Mademoiselle. Are you saying your little friend was a willful girl?" Holmes asked.

"That's what I was told, but we had great fun together, as I remember. Sometimes they would put me in photographs with her because we did look quite a bit alike and that was more artistic or something." She turned her face to the side, so that her heart-shaped features appeared more like the rounder-faced Anna's. "This is the way they made me stand, and I remember that the photographs seemed to take forever, but I never moved."

"You are doing very well. Just one further question," Holmes said. "I understand that you did not spend your entire life in this city, nor in this country. When did you go abroad, and why?" 

"My father had business interests in several places, mostly mining. He had substantial holdings in Algiers, and when there were some threats to his properties, he brought my mother and me to live there for a few years while he resolved things."

"Hence your excellent French," Holmes remarked with unusual gallantry. The girl laughed. "And then you returned?"

"Yes, then we came back home. My mother was especially glad to leave Algiers. She never liked the heat, and she was anxious that I return here to meet a proper husband before I had acquired any unacceptable habits."

"Besides the shooting," I supplied.

'

"Yes," she smiled at my remembrance of our first conversation. "It is a pastime I enjoy."

We talked for a few more minutes, but I could sense Holmes' growing impatience.

"You have been more helpful to us than you can imagine," I said, seeing the girl's confusion at our sudden departure. She grasped my arm. "Isn't that right, Holmes?"

My friend willed himself back from the door. "Yes, of course, Mademoiselle. I beg you to eat anything placed before you, so that your strength has not been affected by an imprisonment that should not last much longer."

"But, Doctor?" She tried to press after me, still clutching my coat. The guard held her back. "You believe me when I say I want nothing of this business?"

"Yes!" Holmes called up the stairs. "Yes! We are on it even now, but I require you to release the doctor to his work."

"I hate leaving a such a girl to her cell," I said when the guards had dispatched our carriage.

My companions were little interested in Maria other than her value as a clue, and they stared out the windows, lost in thought. But I couldn't help but reflect on that very personal connection she had made with me.

"We must help her soon, or a poor diet may weaken an otherwise healthy body," I thought aloud. "Did you note her skin, Holmes? She has been confined for over two weeks with no maid or elaborate toilette, and her skin is remarkably healthy. One would scarcely think she had ever set foot in a sunny climate, she must have cared for it so well. If I had to point out one quality that set Maria out as having a higher station, it would be her skin of a lady."

Holmes' head rested on his hand. He did nothing to betray that my words had reached him, and I resolved to speak no more.

"What are we doing next?" was the question as we rolled back into the town over an hour later. It came not from me, but from Dr. Ghjuvon, fully a member of our detection team by now. "Perhaps there are collections of royal pictures in some of the galleries or museums. I could begin looking for a reproduction of this photograph."

"That is very kind of you, Doctor, but we will do no more chasing after clues for the time being."

"Have you solved the case?" I asked, thinking of the young prisoner we had just left behind.

"Not at all, although we may be somewhat closer thanks to your contribution, dear Watson," he said with sudden affection. "I, for one, am through being fobbed off by the royal bootlicker assigned to us for that purpose."

We three marched up to the palace gates with no appointment. "It is absolutely essential that we speak to Mr. Abel," Holmes announced in the native tongue using one of the phrases he'd learned on our ride in. The internationally renowned detective can be quite formidable when he wishes to, and using a combination of stray phrases, French and pantomime, he indicated that we would not move without speaking to the royal secretary.

At some length we were ushered into the library. "This is most irregular, Mr. Holmes," the secretary began.

"Yes, this entire affair has been handled in the most irregular manner possible. We are busy men, the three of us, and will spend not one more moment on this charade unless you facilitate a meeting with the Gunther nurse right away."

"With the nurse?" the secretary asked, surprised. "She was not Maria's nurse, I thought, but the dead woman's. More like a serving-woman than anything, the lowly creature. What possible assistance could she give you in determining the parentage of the young ladies? The old crone is half-mad. She attacks anyone who comes near her and won't speak a word when spoken to."

"Perhaps she can do nothing, perhaps a good deal. But at the present she has little reason to lie to us, while you, sir, took a great deal of time in producing a copy of the dead woman's letter for me, and you completely concealed the photograph that accompanied it."

"The letter is being held in the most absolute secrecy, Mr. Holmes. You can appreciate that you are a stranger in this land and yet you were still furnished with an opportunity to read the dead woman's missive," Mr. Abel said icily. "As for the photograph, the one found on the dead woman is also being kept in secrecy. You will see it is very damning. Nevertheless, please come this way."

We were led into a wing of the palace we had not yet visited, one that was in the opposite direction of the portrait room where we had spent some time. We finally came to rest in a comfortable room with a view over the park.

"This is a sitting room favored by the queen," the secretary said stiffly. "I was given instructions to bring you here to view the portrait should you require it, but her Majesty does not allow her private collection of family items to be handed about like souvenirs."

This parlor did have a warmer feeling than the formality that reigned in the rest of the palace. It was more like the mementoes any matriarch would accumulate from her many children. There was a child-sized horse crop, a dried wreath from a wedding, and many more very human touches one would scarcely suspect the forbidding monarch to possess.

"The photograph is there. You may look, but not touch," Abel said.

We all bent to look. The photograph was evidently taken when the girls were perhaps 4 or 5, and was clearly an image from the 1860s, as it was carefully planned to look more spontaneous than earlier long-exposure methods. There were two adults in the picture, partially out of frame, presumably keeping the two smaller children still. For it was the children that were the focus of this portrait.

Including Princess Anna, there were four children in the frame, all very handsome though none as finely dressed as the youngest daughter of the queen, who had a hair-comb holding back her tress to reveal only the right ear. The other children were a boy and two girls, and they had inferior postures to the princess in the center of the frame. They were all studying flowers very intently, but only Maria and Anna, the two older girls, each had a butterfly-net in her hands.

Maria was in the act of receiving a flower from Princess Anna. Because the visitor was posed exactly the way Maria had described, her more heart-shaped face reaching her hand out became almost indistinguishable from that of the girl offering her the flower.

"One could see why the photographer chose the girl specifically because of the resemblance," I suggested.

"And why Greta Gunther would have chosen it to illustrate a story she had little time to tell. The girls could be twins," our expert in heredity said. "It is almost as thought he Princess were looking at herself in a mirror."

"Yes, I believe everything about this photo to have been very carefully composed," replied Holmes. "You see the deliberate way in which the supposed flower-garden is distributed? The play of light and shadow, with the adults nearly invisible because they are dressed in dark clothing? On the table there is a page with the royal seal, the only indication of where it was taken. Very tasteful. It would be very interesting to meet the person who took the photograph."

The secretary hurried us out of the private wing as soon as we had looked our fill. Then he advised us, "The royal photographer from that day is not available to be interviewed. He has gone to South America to photograph the wildlife. But I have been instructed to provide the information for the couple you saw in the picture, who were the parents of the small boy and girl in the foreground. The Lord and Lady Bertrand Orian reside not far away."

Holmes plucked the note of introduction from Abel's hand. "We shall call upon them tomorrow," he said without a word of thanks, and we had no choice but to follow him out.

All of this royal protocol was vexing, but I did not think rudeness to the family's steward would help us to advance. Holmes waved me away and I was forced to spend an evening alone, missing England, with my only solace, writing, forbidden to me by the terms of our employment.

"Don't worry, my friend. We should be home very soon," Holmes said kindly when he came to watch me eat breakfast in the hotel dining room.

"Whatever do you mean? I'm perfectly comfortable," I returned in an irritable tone.

"You're wearing a jacket that will prove to be too warm for the warm weather we've been enjoying, but you decided this morning that you would dress for where you'd rather be, instead of where you are. Are you nearly finished? An answer came from the Lord and Lady Orian. They are expecting us soon. We will not require Ghjuvon, I think."

The cab driver knew the address well, and he conveyed us to a stately manor situated on a fashionable street near the main thoroughfare.


	3. Chapter 3

The couple who received us was nearly the same age as the deceased Mrs. Gunther, about 40. Lady Orion was still in her prime, with dark brown hair cascading in curls down the sides of her face in rather more of a daring coiffeur than an English lady of her age would have attempted.

Her husband was tall and pale with dark chestnut hair, and affected an odd sort of hat at a jaunty angle. It was evident that although Lord Bertrand was a nobleman of a rank several steps closer to the royal family than Maria's family, the couple considered itself artistic. Even I could deduce from the splatters of paint on the lord's hat that his interest in art was less superficial than his wife's.

We were invited to sit down in a parlor decorated with excellent taste and a maid brought coffee. Lord Orian did not sit but stood fussing with a canvas he had set up so he could paint the garden visible from the large window.

"The palace had advised you we might visit?" Holmes inquired.

"Yes, they came right after poor Greta died and asked if we had a copy of the portrait with the two girls. We must have lost our print at some point, but they made a frightful mess going through our house," Lady Lidia Orian said, handing me a cup. "I can see why they wish to preserve the Princess from any calumnies by containing this rumor, but I think it's absurd. How could the girls' true origins never have asserted themselves in all these years? Maria was Greta's child, through and through, not a princess."

Holmes made a noncommittal sound, and I preferred this to hearing a speech on his irreverent views of monarchies.

"I had understood your relationship to the photograph was through the royal family, not the Gunthers," I chose to ask instead.

"My family is an offshoot of the house of Vargas, yes," the lord replied from his corner. "Through that connection, Lidia and I were were fortunate to spend a good deal of time there when the children were small. At that age, they are not separated by better education or fine manners or any awareness of differences between them. They're just children, and those of us with a family line leading to the court and had children of the right age were rather thrown together."

"And we always got on very well with the Gunthers," our hostess took over, "Our two families became a natural unit, frequenting each other very often outside of the palace as well."

She picked up another photograph, evidently by the same artist. "Here is a photograph with our children, Agnes and Lucius, taken at the castle. There were two other photographs like this, with Princess Anna but with no Maria. Since Princess Anna was the youngest of the Queen's many children, all of her peers by age had settled families with almost no new arrivals like our young ones. Certainly there were no girls just a few weeks apart like Maria."

"Can you tell me anything of the girls' dispositions, Lady Orian?" Holmes asked.

"Certainly. Maria had a very warm and kind disposition from a young age, so that it was a pleasure to have her around. She made the princess more tractable, as Princess Anna was a child mostly brought up among adults and liked to have her way. She's much calmer now, but as a child she had very fixed opinions about who she liked and disliked, and she liked Maria," the lady recalled.

"When was the last time they saw each other?"

"Maria's family moved abroad for some years," the husband spoke up again. "The mother and daughter returned to their home city and then the husband died a few years after. Maria's mother had delicate health, some infirmity picked up in Algiers, I imagine. Greta's former servant came to care for her and she never went out in society."

"I saw her a few times at their home," said the wife, "But her manner had become very taciturn, almost rude, though we were close years ago and Greta was always so docile. She said she didn't want to be looked at as she was, for she had grown thin and sickly, and after two visits she asked that I not come again."

Holmes assumed an intent look. "Did she ask after your children?"

Lady Orian reflected. "I suppose she did. Yes, certainly it would have been polite, and though her manners were brusque, she asked after every member of my family, my brothers and their spouses as well, all by name. As a rule she was very considerate, Greta, just like Maria turned out to be. Maria I have seen out in society, and she has always been pleasant, even when she must have known her mother's prognosis was very grim."

My companion was staring off into space again, and so I said, "I have spoken to Mademoiselle Maria on two occasions, and have found her to have an admirable composure considering the stress of her circumstances. Still, it must be no easy thing to mourn a mother who had more sorrows than she knew."

It was a noncommittal remark to fill the silence, but Holmes gave a significant nod at my words.

"Thank you for meeting with us, Lady Orian, you have been most helpful," my friend said. "And Lord Orian, we are most appreciative."

"Anything to help Maria out of her predicament," the man said, leaning from around his portrait. "A noble young lady no matter what the outcome of your investigation, I should say."

"He's an interesting sort of lord, with his dramatic hat and coloring," I remarked when we left the Orians' residence. "He certainly has the makings of a man who has done no work in his life. Even I saw that his hands were as soft as a maid's—but most people of good breeding have more respect for it."

When we were out on the main street, Holmes proposed walking back to our hotel, which would take us through some of the busiest districts of the city.

"Very well said, once more, Watson. We may not know the mother, but we know she kept an explosive secret over many years. This tells us quite a bit. The palace may be less than forthcoming, and we have little evidence from the fire or the girls' early years. But what remains when all the clues are washed away?" He gestured to the passersby. "Character. We can take each personage's character to be a relative constant, and deduce from there in which direction we might find real evidence."

"Character will not relieve these two young women of their uncertainty," I pointed out. "Maria, especially, needs some solid proof that she is not some kind of upstart."

"Yes, quite. Uncertainty can be a difficult sentence," my friend agreed. "Step by step Watson." Then he turned his attention to the life on the streets of this foreign city, and refused to discuss any more about the case. He seemed to be looking for something in the districts we passed.

My impression was confirmed when he chose for our dinner spot a restaurant that reminded me of an amenable establishment I had sometimes visited with him and Bruno, though there was nothing to indicate that it catered to such a clientele.

Holmes' manner was abstracted and we ate mostly in silence. I discerned one of his occasional raw nerves about his lost lover. but he was looking over his diagrams of the jubilee celebration, along with the newspaper articles translated by Ghjuvon describing the scene with the musicians and the dancers, and then the fire in the children's tent.

Then he spoke. "One of the nursemaids said afterwards, 'We were watching the fireworks when suddenly the embers alighted on the tent and all was ablaze, with burning cloth blowing at us."

He thrust a page in front of me. "Mark this, Watson: 'We carried all the little ones away, one to each arm' But how many children do you think would be in the charge of each nursemaid.? Surely the little princess' nurse was only looking after her?"

"We know the woman was separated from the tent and couldn't return. But I should think each noble baby would have its own caregiver. Perhaps more than one."

He struck the table. "But her particular nursemaid was dismissed and has since deceased. It is most frustrating, this solving a crime backwards."

"Indeed, Holmes," I said calmingly. "We see twenty years of aftermath and none of the explosion."

Those deep gray eyes were regarding me with a sort of wonder. "Say that again, Watson."

"Twenty years of—"

"You give me the first breath of reason in days, my good friend. Nay, you said something very valuable in the carriage yesterday." He'd thrown some money on the table, sprung up and grabbed his coat. "I'm going for a walk. You should get some air as well. I've been overworking you with this case. Moderation in all things, Doctor."

An exultant Holmes returned to the hotel couple of hours later with Ghjuvon, who was bearing books and papers and rather unfairly most of the weight. Sherlock Holmes could only wave around two pieces of paper. "You see this, Dr. Watson? Look at it well, for it is a scientific discovery that will sadly never be published."

"If you stop waving it perhaps I will read it," I said, mindful of the late hour. He thrust the two sheets under my nose. One was the list of characteristics we had gathered from Maria.

"Right there, Watson, you noted it yourself. 'Six scattered marks, each with a slight concavity, barely distinguishable on the right forearm.' They were the key all along."

"She says she doesn't remember how she got them. A child scrapes herself many times. It could have been any sort of childhood injury," I objected.

"Maria Gunther has a lovely skin. Was it not you who drew my attention to it? A lovely complexion, as could befit any royal court, or something to that effect," Holmes said in high spirits.

I could feel my face redden. "Perhaps I did say something about her cutis, but I meant nothing indecent."

"That is not my meaning, old man. Besides maintaining a ladylike aspect, why would Greta have been so concerned that Maria stay out of the sun?"

"Greta Gunther was quite put out by any of her daughter's sporting interests that might put her in the sun," I mused. "If a mother were concerned that her child might have a sensitivity to the sun, she would teach her to always care for her skin."

"Your observations follow mine exactly, my friend, but let me nudge you even further. A _genetic _sensitivity to the sun," Holmes supplied.

"Porphyria," I responded, and then our friend the scientist could contain himself no longer. He handed me a book describing the likelihood of inheriting the disease.

"It is known that a sensitivity to sun can run in families," Ghjuvon said. "For those with a mild affliction, avoiding the sun is sufficient, but for some, grave illness can result from exposure through pathways we only poorly understand. A noble family keeps better records than most, and there are no mentions of porphyria in its past."

"Well that is wonderful! If Maria truly has some form of porphyria and the Vargas line is not known to have it, then she is saved! Neither girl must give up her life," I said with relief.

"I know you are anxious to save our prisoner from her dungeon, but wait a moment, Watson," said Holmes. "Nothing like porphyria came up in any of the interviews we conducted with the house of Gunther, although the parents are no longer alive. A few faint blemishes that might be the remnants of a sun rash are not enough to guarantee the girl's release."

I rested my head in my hands. My level of energy wasn't anything like that of the other two men, who kept exchanging little glances of complicity. Holmes rang for the porter and Ghjuvon had some brief conversation with him. Then my friend was back at the charge.

"There is a mistaken parentage in this case, but it is not bound up with the royal family. At least not its central trunk. We've been examining all the wrong people."

"Oh yes?" I asked, not looking forward to more examinations.

"And what did your keen medical eye also note about someone else's skin?"

I cast my mind back. "The Prince Robert had a rather large strawberry birthmark on his left inner thigh. The Princess Beatrice has a tendency to pruritis. Then in the Gunthers I observed a minor darkening on the upper lip—"

"Yes, yes, that's all fine," Holmes interrupted. "I should have specified—someone not in the royal family."

Both men were waiting for me to understand their meaning. It took me only a moment. "The Lord Bertrand Orian, who was in the photograph with the two little girls. I remarked on his coloring because his skin is unusually pale for someone with such dark hair. But he seems healthy, so without examining him I couldn't speak about the import of his pallor."

"That won't be necessary. You remember how his face was obscured by a large hat in the photograph? It must have been similar to the one we saw him affecting at a rakish angle today. Why should he wear such a hat, which was neither then nor is now in fashion?" my friend pursued.

"A severe sensitivity to the sun," I breathed. Perhaps the lord had struck me as a man with no profession because his freedom was limited by photosensitivity. "He was painting the garden from inside. Why would anyone do that when they can step outside and paint from up close?" Then the detective's import finally struck me. "You're saying Maria Gunther is the child of Lord Orian?"

Suddenly I felt very dizzy. The coffee came, though I would have much preferred a whiskey. Holmes poured me a cup.

"I think it is very likely, Watson, though I am almost entirely positive that neither Lord nor Lady Orian suspected it. Lady Orian knew nothing of the affair, I am almost sure. She seemed genuinely hurt that Greta did not wish to renew their acquaintance."

"When you think of the context of the note, Greta's meaning is now very clear," Ghjuvon reminded me.

"Lord Orian struck me as a decent chap. Greta must have feared that he would have made some type of settlement on the girl, perhaps tried to raise her himself," I said. 

"That seems to have been the dead woman's meaning, but if there was this affair that at least Lord Orion himself was aware of, why did neither he, nor anyone else step forward before the royal hysteria landed upon Maria as a pretender to the line of accession?" Holmes asked me.

"Well the photograph. The girls were and are strikingly similar. And because deathbed confessions are usually of the greatest candor, for the person has no reason to obscure their meaning any longer."

"Greta was very clear, but we mistook the meaning entirely, and I believe she would have wished us to have all the facts. Maria said that the original letter had a line where the pen had fallen from her mother's hand—which went still before she could express the whole story."

He drew out his sketch of the photograph and circled the shadowy adult male figure and little Maria. "We have been focusing on the two girls in the foreground who, yes, are nearly twins, although that meaning only became apparent with the servant's story. It is far more likely that the servant put the photograph in the woman's hands. But divert your gaze to this pair. This is perhaps the only photograph of a father with the daughter he did not know was his. Greta kept in on her bed table. A love that never quite extinguished, at least in Greta's heart? It would explain why she would not accept Lord Bertrand in to see her when she was sick."

I lit my pipe while shaking my head. "Then Lord Orian and Greta Gunther had an assignation if not a longer relation, and neither spouse suspected? It seems a difficult thing for a woman to bear alone."

"We won't know the reason for Mr. Gunther taking them abroad to Algiers, but this is where we can wager upon character. Lady Orian described her as a very pleasant and polite woman. We can only deduce that any suspicions about the hidden romance were able to be ignored quite well by all involved, due, I believe, to the woman's accommodating nature."

It struck me that my friend was doing much better in the human nature department since his own affair. He was striding up and down my room. "Greta may have had this liaison, but her desire not to offend was to be completely relied upon. This woman from her minor branch of nobility was the hub around which both families' stasis revolved. It was only when she was dying that she turned her eye to her girl's fortunes more than to maintaining her own. Character, as I said. And Maria is completely her mother's daughter—remember that she was one of the few children who could get along with the willful princess."

The coffee was making me more alert but my head was swimming with all this new information. This theory still made no sense to me.

"If Maria has no idea she possesses this trait, the only way your theory could help her would be if we set her in the sun to burn. That would be an unacceptable risk," I said.

"Ah, there is someone who can save us from such a measure."

Sherlock Holmes disappeared for a moment and returned with his outdoor things.

"Put on your coat, Watson. We're going to make a visit."

"At this hour?"

"The jailers won't mind, and the palace will be happy if I obtain proof that helps them keep their princess."

We found a cab willing to take us across town to the ladies' jail. The whole way there I shuddered to think that Maria could ever end up in such a place. My mind got carried away, considering if she really were the child of Lord Orian, and if so, what that might mean for her future and the other family.

Dr. Ghjuvon and Holmes were talking about something but I couldn't be bothered to listen. When the cab left us at the unsavory destination, I took little comfort in finding that my imaginings were correct. The stone edifice seemed drafty and damp and the guards at the front door had a most forbidding aspect.

Holmes marched us up to the sentry gate and stood there impatiently while Ghjuvan had some conversation with the man.

"Will you tell me why we're here?" I asked while the scientist tried to gain our admittance. "You have your theory—a very thin theory, I think, and one that won't satisfy the royal family entirely, either. This woman is half-mad, I thought they said."

"Hush, Watson, you'll be able to follow the next bit quite well."

A higher-ranking superintendent was coming down the front steps with his shirt half-untucked from his uniform jacket.

"Monsieur Holmes and the two doctors," he said in French, offering his hand. "Please forgive this rude treatment. I had been told you might visit us, but alas, you came while I was resting in my office. We have much to do with our special prisoner, you will see."

He brought us up a narrow stone staircase to where a man was keeping watch. The superintendent had a brief conversation with the guard, who shrugged and stepped back.

"Do you mind if I watch your methods, Monsieur Holmes? I have heard much about you but never imagined I would see you in action," the warden asked.

"Not at all," Holmes said.

The door was unlocked.

We saw an elderly woman who was not all that ancient, but looked older because of her unkempt appearance. Her white hair was all askew and she was crouching in a corner. She directed a snarl at all of us equally.

Sherlock Holmes was not in the least perturbed. He bowed to the woman, called her "Miss Marta," and, when two men brought in a table and some chairs, pulled out the chair for her until she reluctantly sat.

The jailers seemed to have expected some violence done with the chairs, for there was not a stick of furniture in the room, but Ghjuvon and I sat on either side of our friend and waited to see what would happen next.

Out of his pocket, Holmes produced a sketch of Maria's mother, Greta, which I recognized as being from as a likeness the royal secretary had supplied several days ago. Then my friend produced the sketched reproduction of the photograph clutched by the dead woman, depicting the two girls, Anna and Maria. side by side, with the man we now knew to be Lord Orian in the background. He said the word for "father" I recognized by now from their language.

Marta drew back with a hunted expression but then her jaw set again. The superintendent made a motion and the jailers gathered around her should she lash out, as she had apparently done in the innumerable interrogations before this one.

Holmes then showed her a photograph of the entire royal family, en masse, again, a likeness that had been furnished by Mr. Abel in the hopes of establishing the princess' paternity. Compared to the frail woman in her cell, the whole group of them looked very wealthy and very powerful.

The elderly nurse crossed her arms.

Then Holmes gave the prisoner a steely stare and said another phrase very clearly.

"What did he say?" I asked Ghjuvon, now understanding that Holmes had been picking up a few necessary phrases on the drive there.

"Traitor," he explained.

The old woman made a scoffing noise and said one word.

"Never, she says."

Next, Holmes extricated his map, the one he had studied so often in his attempts to understand the night of the fire.

His finger traced the map of the grounds, one going in the direction of the house, and one coming from the estate house towards the fire. I assumed he was trying to understand who had rescued the babies from their cribs, as whoever Maria's parents might have been, she still could have been confused with the real princess in the fire.

The detective traced these two paths twice, was beginning to trace them a third time when the woman's face went white.

"Traitor," was all Holmes said.

The woman began to shiver so violently I couldn't bear to see it. She accepted my coat around her shoulders but only had eyes for Sherlock Holmes.

"How many?" I had heard that phrase often enough in the shops. Holmes was pointing to the drawing of the children's tent. Marta held up ten fingers and then three more. Then he uttered a name very low, too softly for me to catch, and she shook her head emphatically.

Holmes traced his fingers on their convergent paths once more. The superintendent looked as confused as I was, and when I glanced at Ghjuvon, he seemed lost as well.

The interrogator uttered the word for traitor twice more, once while pointing to the face of her old mistress, once while jabbing his finger at the other end of the table, where the photograph of the royal family lay.

He said two more sentences, which was duly translated by the scientist:

"A family will do much for the sake of reputation, but you have no one to take pains for your sake."

Whereupon the old lady shrieked and then covered her mouth.

Holmes then turned to the superintendent. "May we have paper and a pen, should our prisoner wish to confess?"

A jailer was sent to procure the items, but our host chuckled. "This one won't break down so easy."

The paper and pen was placed before the lady, who regarded them disdainfully.

"Please," Holmes said in her language.

He faced off with the fierce old woman for a few moments before standing up. "Let us leave our faithful nurse to her thoughts," he said in French.

To my surprise, as Holmes turned away the prisoner wept and implored the detective for mercy, something I could clearly see without translation.

The tall man regarded the desperate creature on her knees. He said something in a harsh tone and swept out, tugging my coat from her shoulders as he left. The rest of us could only follow.

"If you would not mind having your sentry stay with the Judas window open so that she does not do anything foolish in her desperation, I wager that Miss Greta will soon come round."

"Your friend's intonation is very good in our tongue," the superintendent marveled to me.

"Yes, Holmes has a gift with accents," I agreed.

We approached the front door and Holmes stepped outside. "Let us wait a while," he advised. "My little performance had but few lines left and no more characters to enter. If she does not confess that she added the portrait from the bedside and tell a fantastic story about the fire at the palace to mislead those who found the letter, she never will."

Finally, I understood the performance Holmes had just given. He kept saying "traitor" to show that he understood why the old woman would cause such a scandal in order to protect Greta's reputation—Holmes had said as much in one of his sentences. "To think that one woman would go to such lengths to protect the reputation of another woman—not even a relation—and even after death," I mused.

"Indeed," was all my friend said.

We smoked a few cigarettes in the fresh night air, in which I fancied I could smell the trees of the country's famed mountain region. Ghjuvon, who does not partake of tobacco due to his compressed chest cavity, spoke: "If she is smart, she will say nothing. We have no proof that Lord Orian is Maria's true father. And even if we did, that does not discount possibility the two children were confused during the fire. Which is why you were asking her to retrace her movements on the map, I presume?"

"Yes, Marta was a palace servant assigned to work inside during the jubilee, but I could not discount her knowing something important," Holmes agreed.

We stared up at this foreign sky for a few moments, and then he continued, "This was not a crime of reason, though it would have been a splendid one. It was, as you said, Watson, a crime of the deep, blind loyalty she felt towards her mistress. We may never know why that affection developed, but we can only hope that she has begun to understand that she is betraying her mistress' dying wish."

Just as we were getting chilled a guard came to fetch us. "She has spoken! She has spoken!" He said in mangled French.

We returned to the cell, where the woman appeared to be coming out of a fit of hysterics before a tin mug that must contain some kind of spirit. Her face was still streaming with tears and she was talking as if to her self, but at least she was writing with a deliberate hand on one of the sheets of paper placed before her. Two sheets were already filled.

The superintendent addressed us in French:

"It was just as you said, Mr. Holmes. She did not wish for Miss Maria to understand who her father was, as it would reveal the mother's adultery and cause disruption to another family, something she believed her mistress would not have supported had she been thinking clearly on her deathbed."

"Is she writing of the fire?" Holmes asked.

Our host peered over her shoulder. "Only to say that she was there the day of the fire and knew that both girls had sustained similar injuries. She had to do nothing except tell this true story of what happened 20 years ago and let everyone draw the wrong conclusions from the letter and photograph."

"Ah yes," Holmes nodded with approval and said a word to that effect in the woman's language. Marta gave him a frightened look and kept writing and mumbling to herself.

"Did she make clear why she had such a devotion to Greta Gunther?" I asked the superintendent.

"Yes, she was mumbling something about her mistress taking her away from her post at the palace, where she was unhappy. There was a man, she didn't say what sort of man, who was pressing his affections on her. The Lady Greta hired her on the spot because this woman was one of those from the palace who fought their way to the children's tent and saved her little girl. She was grateful for being free of this troublesome situation."

"Ah. Two women with a lifelong feeling of indebtedness to each other would form a very strong bond," I said.

"One that continues after death, it seems," Holmes concluded. "Gentlemen, it has been a long night of good work. Shall we see you before your train tomorrow, Ghjuvan?"

The scientist considered. "The best train for me is midmorning, so alas I think not."

We all shook hands and made invitations for the other party to stay with us should he be in our city, and the great student of heredity who was so scorned by the same took his own cab to his hotel.

"Good heavens, Holmes, the best train for us is midday. I would rather get some sleep before then," I said as we drove.

"Sleep all you like, Watson. I don't expect the royals keep a very early schedule either." He nodded. "We are not leaving today. But it was best that the essential Dr. Ghjuvon thought we would. This is a leg of the journey that only you and I can traverse, my friend."


	4. Chapter 4

As predicted, we had slept, bathed and were in the middle of a late breakfast in the downstairs dining room when the royal coach passed the window and clattered to a stop outside. We had our coats on in a moment and had climbed in to where the royal secretary was waiting.

"The family is very pleased with your results of last night, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson," the officious little man said. "They insisted upon bringing you both to the castle to receive their personal commendations for taking away any doubt that Princess Anna belongs where she is."

"That is most kind of them," Holmes said in a curious tone.

We exchanged observations about the old servant's clever fraud and her likely fate all along the way to the castle. Or Mr. Abel and I did, with Holmes merely saying a word here and there.

We were ushered into some splendid chamber that was new to us, one that contained all of the queen's extant children but none of the spouses. Just as Mr. Abel was opening his mouth to announce us, the door was swung closed upon his face. His look of shock as the heavy doors were coming together was indeed comical. This stood in stark contrast to the expressions of the royal family, who did not seem at all pleased with all of our exertions.

"Why did you put a map of the palace grounds before that woman?" Prince Robert, the eldest brother, asked Holmes without preamble.

"I wished to ascertain that she had told every detail about her behavior on that day," my friend said. "The fact that Maria is the result of an affair does not totally discredit the possibility that the girls were confused that night. Dr. Watson, would you care to explain our theory about porphyria?"

I had gotten through only part of my explanation of what porphyria was and why the possibility that Maria might have it was the best proof of her parentage, when Prince James interrupted.

"Didn't you already know that this Marta woman was handing out drinks inside the visitor's parlor? I am sure you had this fact, as it was in the initial documents that were set before you when you arrived," another brother said coldly.

"The palace's trouble in assembling our facts has been most appreciated," Holmes said mildly.

"We only wish to understand if you still have doubts about who is our sister," Princess Beatrice said more kindly. "These allegations have been a terrible upset to Anna and her family, and the sooner she can put this behind her, the better."

The princess in question sat to one side, watching the proceedings.

"My lady, you need not trouble yourself about my views—I am completely discreet," the detective answered.

Suddenly I felt very nervous indeed.

"And to what does your discretion extend?" Prince James fairly gnashed through his teeth.

"That the events on the night of the fire did not happen as the version you so carefully prepared would have use believe. That the princess was never in the fire and sustained her injury in a different manner."

There was not a sound. The fact that I had no idea what was upsetting this long line of royals did nothing to calm my nerves.

Finally, Prince Robert spoke. "Supposing this were so, you are bound by your oath not to discuss this matter with anyone outside of this room." He picked up our three signed statements. "The one who left before we had a full report of your interrogation, I assume he does not know what you just told me?"

"Dr. Ghjuvon has been spared any knowledge of this," began Holmes, but then one of the other princesses cried out:

"It is very distressing, even now, to think of it You didn't see how he looked, and the blood. There was so much blood everyone thought he'd hurt himself."

"I remembered it as though she'd been burned in the fire," confessed the youngest woman in the room. "It was terrible to hear the truth when this girl appeared with her lies."

"Under the influence of the serving-woman's lies," one of her siblings corrected her.

"My brother was just a child. He had an unfortunate tantrum in which he happened to find his sister unattended and the weapon handy," a brother rushed to say. "Please do not think badly of Leo."

The picture that was forming in my mind was difficult to look at.

"Neither I, nor Dr. Watson, are the persons to make judgment over what a very young child might have done long ago," Holmes said smoothly. "I am merely content that the injury was very slight, and no doubt, the commotion going on because of the fire was the best way to minimize the trauma on those children too young to understand and protect the family's privacy."

"Thank you, Mr. Holmes. We had regretted contracting you once you began getting so near to the truth, and we withheld several things so that you would not know what we really wished to keep private. Yet it seems you understand our position after all," Prince Robert pronounced with the tiniest of nods. "There is nothing to be gained from making this family matter known."

"And thank you, Dr. Watson," Princess Beatrice said to me. "We passed no undue indignity under your care."

I bowed. Holmes bowed. We exited, and met with the miffed royal secretary, who placed an unbelievably generous cheque in our hands. Holmes propelled me out with a commanding hand on my elbow that brooked no discussion.

When we had at last cleared the royal grounds and were on a public street, I burst out, "What just happened? Did you have me agree to cover up something monstrous without telling me what it was? How could you lead me into such a moment without preparing me for the international incident I might be causing?"

"No, Watson, I promise you, you will not reproach me this obfuscation. You will notice that I allowed them to give voice to what they suspected I knew, and I could say no more than that about this family wound, for not just the little princess was hurt that night. And I have learned something from your delicacy with human specimens, without which we might not have progressed this far on the case. Let us discuss the matter in the privacy of our rooms."

We walked the way back to the hotel, and though I was not yet sure what had happened, I felt as though a great crisis had passed. I trust Holmes judgment on cases, and I was sure that we had done a great good for the royal family we had just left, which was, after all, a family.

The air was even more redolent of hidden mountains than last night, and the people's faces, the shops and the horses had begun to attain that composition that usually is only visible in the mind's eye of the traveler after he has left a foreign land.

"Do you think it would look the same way if we were to live here?" I said aloud. "This city, I mean."

"I doubt it, because London looks singular to me when I return after a journey abroad but it soon takes on its homely look again." Holmes laughed. "I think I shall be unusually glad to see our streets again after our long absence.

We entered the hotel and on the way up Holmes ordered us food but mostly drink, unusual so early in the day.

As we sipped our whiskey, Sherlock Holmes did reveal to me the crime that had truly concerned the royal family. If you are reading this coded version of these events, it is because I judged my obfuscated tale successful enough. For this "red-letter" case to have been opened could still have only happened according to a stipulation of my will after my death, or if the monarchy in question has fallen.

"From the beginning, it seemed that the family was unusually nervous," Holmes began. "Not allowing me into the consultations was a sign of undue caution, I thought. Then the delay in interviewing both Maria and the nurse. It seemed that they wished me to find the truth, but not certain aspects of the truth. It took me a very long time that these obfuscations were mere distractions from their real concern."

"Do you know which is the real princess or not?" I said in exasperation.

"Perhaps not the sort of proof that you would like to give the charming young lady who clung to you so," he twinkled. "But the small scars on Maria's arm are a good indication to me that she suffered a severe sunburn early in life, and thus, was born as Maria. The family should have liked unassailable proof of their sister's provenance, but this was not their true concern."

"No?" I asked, refilling my glass.

"No, they were anxious that little Prince Leo's attempt to murder his baby sister remain a private matter."

Perhaps it was the strong drink we were imbibing with a light lunch, but my head swam. I spluttered for a moment until Holmes thumped my back.

"It sounds terrible to say it aloud," he recognized. "Which is why the royals would very much prefer that this youthful indiscretion never reach the newspapers. Can you imagine the headlines? 'The Prince Who Attempted to Stab the Princess with a Pair of Shears'? The papers would make meat of it for months."

"I had always thought the late prince was protected because his health was always very delicate," I ventured.

"Yes, his hemophilia was noted from infancy and he had to be separated from the other children at play."

Holmes took a drink, watching me all the while.

"The boy was therefore coddled by his mother, who looked out for him especially," I continued. There was a silence. "But the Princess Anna is known as the queen's very favorite." Holmes said nothing. "No! An act of infantile jealousy!"

"Yes, Doctor. On the day of an enormous celebration there were not enough nursemaids, and those that were caring for the children were distracted by the festivities. The Princess Anna's nurse, Delia, laid her down somewhere inside, away from the noise—perhaps because the baby was bothered by it.

"Something happened, we know not what, and the nurse is called elsewhere. The little boy Leo had followed for some time the movements of his hated little sister, the one who had taken his place in his mother's affections. He saw his opportunity: there was a sharp object nearby but his puny strength keeps him from doing more damage than a couple deep cuts to the baby's outer ear. The wound did bleed quite a lot, and no doubt he was frightened when someone, most likely Delia, grabbed up the two children."

"Yes, there would have been enough blood that the nurse removed the gown and perhaps hid it somewhere," I reflected.

"Having averted this tragedy, the nurse must have gone for help, back towards the party." Holmes made a flourish with his glass. "But the fire had broken out. The nurse running with the two children from a different direction as everyone else, some of them with blood on their clothes, must not have been noted by many with all the confusion. But the old woman Marta must have known Anna was injured, or she couldn't have cooked up the story."

"I see! That was what you were trying to tell the prisoner in a few words. That what she had seen that night was a state secret, and it made her a very dangerous person to the palace."

He took another swallow of liquor. "I had little time to prepare and counted upon being observed. It was no sure thing that the old woman would catch my meaning. My expectation that she was only focused on protecting her mistress was borne out—she had no idea the danger she was in."

My mind was still on the jubilee where so many lives intersected. "And this emergency that everyone had witnessed, that was in the papers, quickly absorbed the other near-tragedy, which is why some of the children were not aware of the family secret until recently," I grasped. "But I had heard that even until his death, Prince Leo was seldom seen with the family, and I assumed it was because of his ailment."

"No, Watson, you know as well as I that hemophilia does not require sequestration!" Holmes said with some vehemence. I poured him some more whiskey. "I suspect the prince was more unhappy than unhealthy, as he was surely not left alone with the other children after that. He was an isolated little boy who became a rejected man. He never offended again, I don't think, but one can imagine the family never spoke about it and the truth festered. One wonders how much the prince himself knew."

I topped off my own glass and we finished lunch in silence.

When we had loaded our pipes I finally put together what was bothering me. "They knew the truth! That the two little girls had never had a chance to be confused, and yet they were ready to give up their younger sister! Princess Anna sat there today as if her own fate mattered little to her. Why?"

"It appears so. I expect there was a very candid strategy meeting when the allegations surfaced, and Anna's potential sacrifice was met with good breeding all around. Though I expect there was an army of lawyers behind us ready to delay such an exchange for quite a while. Besides, Waston, this zeal to protect the royal dirty laundry is what decided the case, so we can't be too judgmental." He smoked complacently.

"How do you mean?"

"Why the fireworks, of course! Mr. Andre, the punctilious pyrotechnician." We laughed a little tipsily at the phrase. "The palace account-books must have been far better than the bits and pieces they put in our hands. This is royalty we've been dealing with—they don't stay where they are without keeping track of their wealth."

"But what they showed us was very neat."

"But with strategic omissions to disguise the fact that all fancy events were deliberately withheld," he scoffed. "All of them, even the ones that could have been of no interest to us. It was a fine job planned by one of the siblings."

"All of that information was in another register that was lost," I shrugged.

"Then why was the cleaner, more efficient fireworks master the one that had an explosion, the first in his career? Come now, it happened in the front room, Watson. We'd as likely have an explosion in this room."

This new revelation shook me. "You're not saying—"

"That one of the royal agents arranged for that explosion. Yes, I think it is extremely possible. There were the designs from the queen's parties all stored in that room. A plaque recognizing Mr. Andre for his loyal service, which came only two years after the jubilee. There was no way to explain why someone they described to us as a near-murderer would be employed again, and given a special gift besides. Who would think twice about a combustion that befell a fireworks maker?"

"And that other fellow was much less competent, you said."

"Definitely second choice. He wouldn't have picked up the bulk of Mr. Andre's visits, and if he did, the man would have told me so."

I sat back with my pipe in one hand. Holmes refilled my glass once more. "We must allow our brains to absorb all of these happenings, Doctor, because we may never speak of them again."

And so we passed a relaxed afternoon, talking of what the girls' lives would have been like if they had actually traded places. What the sentence on the nursemaid would be—she might have a harsh fate ahead of her, not only because of the scandal she caused, but because of what they feared she knew about the attack on Princess Anna.

Then we got onto the subject of whether murderers are born or made. This was cause for such a rousing discussion that one of the staff was sent up to inquire as to our health. The porter's appearance sent us into a fit of laughter, and they watched us, arm in arm, laughing with drink and relief, exit the hotel in search of more entertainment.

It was a rare relaxed moment for Holmes and me. He navigated high circles better than I, but our long hours at the palace had us subject to the whims of the royal family. It had been a strain for us both, and Holmes suggested billiards to take our mind off things. This is something we had certainly never done together, and our steady state of inebriation made it hilarious.

We walked around a little and then had supper in the hotel dining room, still flushed with drink and our unrepeatable experiences.

Only when we were on the train did I find out that this rare, human afternoon with my friend was, in fact, a performance.

"Pardon me for your headache, Doctor," Holmes said when we were on the train en route to England the next day. "I wouldn't have fed you so much to drink but I needed us to look very English and very harmless."

"What?" I asked irritably, still recovering from such a long binge. "Do you mean to say the whole time we spent saying goodbye to that city was a sham?"

"Not a sham, dear Watson, but a little extra insurance," Holmes corrected. "We were followed by no less than three men on our way back from the palace—my insistence upon walking was a desire to see how much scrutiny we were under. At every one of our stops, someone was there to observe us. The man who watched our game of billiards was thoroughly convinced that we were loud British subjects, and no more."

He looked very satisfied with himself.

"You mean what passes for an afternoon of drinks and laughs between two comrades in arms who have gone through a difficult pass is really another one of your masquerades?" I asked in a low, dangerous voice.

Holmes looked quite astonished. "We were in no small amount of danger, Watson. Did it never occur to you that this foreign power might see fit to rid itself of the two outsiders who possess their state secret?"

I gave him no answer.

"Would you feel better if I hadn't employed some tricks to make it seem as though I had drunk more than I had? I only wished to have one of us with our wits about us in case of some danger."

A silence.

"The man in the hotel dining room had a firearm in his jacket. What could be a truer gesture of friendship than maintaining my readiness to attack the man who was ready to shoot us?"

I fixed him with an icy stare and then closed my eyes, the better to nurse my headache.

Of all the ways Holmes had abused my trust, this felt like the worst.

Perhaps it was because Holmes seemed so much more human since his affair with Bruno, I hadn't expected such cold treatment. Our friendship had always been missing a little harmless recreation, and his counterfeit of it made me feel truly betrayed.

If Holmes only needs someone to be a typical Englishman by his side, I'd rather stay in my surgery, I decided. Being away this long was a real sacrifice.

I spoke little the rest our journey.

Mycroft was waiting for us at the station. "Ah Dr. Watson, I hear you were just as I told them—the right man for the job."

I turned on my heel, collected my own luggage and took my own cab to Baker Street.

Upon returning to London, I was resolved to forget the matter. But it was a conversation with a friend that got me to thinking how I would write it, if I dared to break the confidentiality agreement. And then thinking how to write turned into notes and those notes spawned pages that I guarded even from Holmes.

I maintained my distance from my roommate for some time. Yes, I wished to write about our trip without discussing the fact with him, but I was still deeply wounded by Holmes' performance at the hotel. It seemed so inhuman. Yet though he never referred to his absent lover, I knew he was suffering the separation deeply. He and Bruno had shared a passion that was as smoldering as any I had witnessed between a man and a woman.

My conclusion was that Holmes' true nature is unchanged, but now is mined with pockets of newness and warmth.

And so I stayed away, but not entirely. During this period I performed one autopsy, set two broken fingers, found a file that the detective himself couldn't find in our archives, and went down with my pistol in hand to break up a row that had followed my friend home from some case, among other things. These were merely normal life at 221 B Baker Street, but other than the essentials I endeavored to stay busy with my surgery or my writing.

The only reason I was even there at the same night as Mr. Dougan MacLeod was that this, out of the many evenings Holmes kept inviting me to, came with the promise of cards.


	5. Chapter 5

Before I get to that significant meeting, the reader should know how fortuitous it was that I went out with him, given that I was even more put out with Sherlock Holmes. There was a second incident occurred almost two months after our return from the unnamable foreign land.

Holmes maintained his artist's den and not infrequently spent the night there, which I gathered from the change in his humor when he returned to our quarters, a change I attributed to drugs. My friend did not deny he occasionally indulged in intoxicants, but insisted that he had given over the cocaine in favor of hashish and other more contemplative substances in which he had developed an interest after his hypnotic cure.

Then two weeks went by during which he was gone a great deal, and I began to be concerned. The case upon which he had induced me to help was one of great delicacy involving two well-known scholars who published identical articles in different magazines within the same week. One of them was surely a fraud, but determining which was proving unexpectedly difficult, and both of these academics were considered national treasures. It was a most inopportune time for Holmes to indulge in his stupefacient of the moment, and I intended to tell him so.

I left my surgery that afternoon in an ill humor, not relishing the task ahead of me, nor the prospect of having to deliver my message while that great mind was addled by drugs. He left me no choice other than to confront him where his libidinousness took place, and so I marched up the stairs to his artist's den and gave only the most perfunctory of knocks before bursting in.

"Holmes?" I called into the attic that was now separated into various quadrants by tapestries. "I'd like to have a word with you, and please don't put me off."

Thinking he might be asleep, I moved closer to the curtained bed. "Asleep at 4 o'clock? You can do better, Holmes."

Suddenly, the bed-curtain furled up. "I must disagree with you on that point," said a smiling Sherlock Holmes, wound tightly in the arms of Bruno, and the sheets pulled up to their waists.

"But, Bruno, you decided to return!" My emotions wavered between a relief that Holmes' love had come back to him, and a distrust of this mercurial figure. "It is so good to see you."

"I am likewise very glad to see you," the Italian said. "I could never stay away for very long." The two men had some sort of silent but avid ocular exchange and totally forgot about my presence for a minute.

"Holmes," Bruno finally said. "Without the benefit of your embrace our guest must be cold."

The detective sprang up with a sheet wound around him and turned on the gas he'd had installed in the drafty space. Meanwhile, his lover was allowing himself to be examined by my critical eye. When Holmes had put the kettle on to boil and some music on the phonograph, he ducked back under the covers and pulled the other man's arms around him.

The couple began talking about various unspecifiable activities Bruno had been up to, but I had already made some conclusions about the return of my friend's companion.

When Bruno left, I assumed that he was not sure he was really of this inclination he expressed with Holmes, or at the very least, he was not resolved to act upon it. And then there was Bruno's attitude, so quiescent and accommodating, which led me to think he had gotten carried away by another's passion.

The man I saw in Holmes' bed could have almost been a different Italian. He looked different—very brown and extremely muscular, which was clear without a shirt—as if he had been training for one of these shadowy religious societies with military intentions more than spiritual ones.

Bruno was only a few years younger than his paramour, and Holmes was only in his early thirties. But the strange Holmes family environment that I had always assumed, given Mycroft's lack of emotional development, had always made Sherlock seem older, more controlled, and then there was his profession in which he'd been settled for a decade already.

Whatever had made the former priest seem ethereal and yielding was entirely gone. In its place was a man with evident strength of character, a man who knew what he wanted—and this attraction for Holmes seemed to have increased. Only a fool would miss his eyes following the movements of his lover wherever he strayed within the apartment. Desire and possessiveness imbued every gesture Bruno made towards Holmes, and the latter surrendered gratefully to this more dominant partner.

Though I had tried very hard not to imagine if there were set roles in this relationship, I was now confronted with a set of hazel eyes telling me complacently that whatever I might have supposed was incorrect.

The kettle shrilled. Bruno laid a commanding hand on Holmes' thigh, keeping him in his reclining posture. "Would you mind terribly, Doctor?" the Italian said. "You know where the cups are. We'll be with you in a moment."

I was finished with my tea, had put another kettle on to boil and listened to several more selections of music by the time the lazily dressed pair finally emerged from their bed.

During that time, I considered whether this rudeness was because Holmes was irritated at my bursting into his private dwelling with no warning in order to upbraid him for taking drugs—when clearly his licentiousness was of a different variety. But my friend was never vindictive, and if anything, he had come to rely upon me even more because his new passionate life could not be admitted to everyone, and I was the one person who also knew the man for whom he mourned.

No, Sherlock Holmes freely expressed his affections in front of me because he did not support pretense, but he would have never gone so far as to make me wait while he engaged in some intimate act in another corner of the room.

It was Bruno's audacity that kept me waiting, listening to the slight creaks coming from their bed. I decided it was at least a sign that he wanted the attentions he was receiving very much, and that knowing I saw the balance in their relationship was a small but delicious humiliation Bruno was inflicting upon his mate.

While Holmes served their tea and distributed biscuits to us all, I could detect spots of color high on his cheeks, as if this novel situation had indeed made an impact upon him. He seemed not to feel any animosity towards his friend, and brought his chair—another improvement—close to Bruno's so that the latter could keep one hand flat upon his thigh.

"Will you be staying long?" I interrupted this display to ask.

"I did not wish to stay away, but some things were beyond my control," came the assured voice. He ran a hand through Holmes' tousled hair. "Other things are most constant," he smiled.

"Holmes, pardon the intrusion, but I came by to tell you I was concerned about your lackadaisical attitude towards work. Though I was mistaken about the nature of your distraction, your profession merits your full attention. People rely on you—"

"Sherlock and I have maintained as much of a correspondence as was possible for me these last several months, giving each other comfort in the knowledge that the other has been busy in his solitude," Bruno interrupted. "It is something we share, the ability to get completely absorbed in our occupations. I am so very glad that it has been possible to see him again, given the nature of my work. But none of that seems to be your concern, Doctor, unless you are doubting the sincerity of my affections. You might find that I have learned how to defend my convictions."

This commanding manner took me quite aback. Bruno continued:

"Let me tell you clearly, Dr. Watson: I would not be able to do even a fraction of what I have done in this year and half, were it not with the knowledge of someone waiting for me, someone very specific, and Sherlock Holmes is always delightfully specific." His strong arms clasped Holmes' narrow chest tightly, the balance of physical strength now in his favor.

Holmes took in this dispute over his well-being with a smile. "Are you speaking of these tawdry professors, Watson? Oxford is the crooked one, Cambridge is the victim of the latter's calumnious plot," his languid voice informed me. "The case notes are on the table. As I've told you, my mind never works so quickly as when it is well-lubricated by the best libation of all. Happiness. I've solved four cases these two weeks since Bruno returned. He simply hasn't left me much time to go back to Baker Street and report to you."

"Nor should he, that I can see," Bruno added.

There was clearly no talking to them while they were making up for their long fast, so I arose. "When you're free to talk, Holmes, I'll be at home."

"And we'll be at Treacher's," the visitor said.

My look of distaste at the kind of low habits his lover encouraged sent the two men into peals of laughter.

Two days later I awoke to a very correctly dressed Holmes eating a slice of the toast brought up by Mrs. Hudson.

"But—I would have thought you would be too occupied with your primary position in life, that of a concubine," I couldn't resist saying.

My friend regarded me with his coldest stare. "I do wish you would make your mind up, Watson, that I am still the same person I always was. And realize that the worst disparagement of my affair seems to come from you, my closest friend."

"You suffered atrociously when Bruno left, and I care enough to not wish that upon you again. Does he smoke hashish with you?" The pipe had been on one of the tables and there was a certain odor in the air.

"Bruno is in training and won't accept such an unhealthy habit in his presence. And I think, Watson, that you have forgotten what a tonic physical affection can be," Holmes said with an irritating condescension, coming from the recent convert to a libertine lifestyle.

"What you do at home is your own concern. But why does he have to drag you out to parade you before the denizens at Treacher's?"

"For two reasons, Watson, one of them being that Bruno must endure the most rigorous secrecy as he goes about his work, and being able to go to a somewhat public place with me is a great tonic for him. The second matter is my own concern, one which I am not yet ready to discuss."

Holmes reached across the table and squeezed my arm. "Forgive me, when there is a person with whom one can feel total harmony, sometimes it is easy to forget to use words to express what is going on. I should have left word I had a visitor."

"Is he gone?"

"For now."

My companion's docility at being left once more was enraging. My initial reaction to the Utrimque group of married priests rushed back to me—let them use what ideals they like, these people were all selfish. In my pique, I said, "How do you know what these revolutionaries get up to? Have you seen my medical books about social diseases?"

"You're quite hysterical. I do often go to these specialized meeting places for professional reasons."

"Blackmail, I suppose."

"Indeed. I have solved three such cases recently."

He caught my hurt look at being excluded. "These were people—two men and a lady, to be exact—who were so wary of talking openly with me, the paragon of discretion, that I couldn't bear to tax their trust even further by bringing in another party."

"Everywhere I have accompanied you in this world, people have found me respectful and trustworthy, I thought."

"They have, Watson, because you are the kindest person I have ever known. Let us agree that every society has its rules, and this one I am still a newcomer in."

"And your second reason for visiting Treacher's?" I pursued.

Holmes sighed. "When Bruno passed through town, he brought with him a side of European politics totally different than what makes it to the papers."

"You told me you didn't discuss specifics," I reproached.

"Dear Watson, Bruno and I have an accord—two such observant people as we can glean a great deal from the sort of messages a person involuntarily sends out, but we have agreed not to talk about it, both for safety reasons and because then we'd talk about nothing else."

He leaned forward eagerly. "Do you know he's benefitting richly from studying my methods? The code he created to advise me of his arrival was so good I actually didn't crack it until shortly before he arrived, which is why I did not give warning to my closest friend who has nursed me through these difficult months."

This was the new Holmes speaking, the one who knew how to mollify me, but I was not ready to give up my charge.

"Perhaps because he is not wooing me—if you can call his high-handed manner wooing—I cannot renew my friendship to Bruno so easily. Why did he leave, Holmes, and why come back as if it were nothing?"

"Watson." He pulled out his best cigarettes and offered them to me. "I owe you an explanation. Without your knowledge I enlisted your help in a rather unkind charade. As you can see, my Bruno did not leave for any want of affection, though I preferred you to think so. Yes, you suffered, thinking I was suffering for not being loved enough."

Holmes ranging from sorrow to intoxication to resignation and every point in between: the images of the last 16 months raced through my mind. The way Holmes would look away in the middle of conversation, the way—

"You weren't suffering?" I burst out, eying the spot between his forefinger and thumb that had been stained by rolling the hashish resin into a little ball.

"Pooh, a trifle, exaggerated for your benefit. No, Bruno left to join the most secret and excusive of the groups working in the service of the pope, and he had every reason to believe that they would mistrust him, if not exclude him, on the basis of that one dalliance in Spain."

"The Utrimque seemed not to mind," was all I could think of to say.

He barked a laugh. "That's because they are some of the kindest souls I've ever met. Come now, Watson, you don't think that in devout Catholic circles, particularly the political factions he runs in now, that they have any love or toleration for men like us? This is still the church of the Inquisition we're talking about, my friend. When Bruno returned from Spain he was subjected to penances and promises of hellfire by some, and a complete silence from some of his brother priests. And since I know he spared me the worst of it, the experience must have been atrocious, for I myself would not like to be excoriated by a cardinal with a lifetime's experience in sending people to hell."

Before I could ask what this had to do with Holmes' supposed charade, he continued, "My companion expected to have a very difficult time proving that he would be an asset as an accused homosexual, but as you can see, our Bruno has many hidden strengths and must have eventually proven his worth."

"Must have?"

"We cannot speak of these things, but I take the fact that he was here to be a positive sign."

Such complete trust of such a changeable creature was unfathomable for me, and my face must have showed it.

"Watson, don't you see? Bruno did the only gentlemanly thing to do by leaving with no promises. I deliberately left the details obscure because I learned something from the underworld denizens you rousted when you were trying to piece together my story. Your loyalty can be quite formidable at times. Some of the tavern owners were quite intimidated by you."

"They were?" I always feel a step behind in the brothels and opium dens Holmes navigates with ease.

"Indeed," my friend smiled. "Which is why I used you as my unwitting accomplice to cover over the unchanged affections between me and my paramour. With gestures that were impossible to dissemble, you made those who knew of my affair aware of the fact that I had been jilted and you thought very poorly of the person who had done so. At several men's cafés, for instance, they believed it was a clean break, one that they saw scarify and heal over the last year. It was the only thing I could do for Bruno, should the agents from his world choose to investigate an affair that, while discreet, had undoubtedly happened, but apparently would never happen again."

Most of me thought that Holmes was merely ignorant of his own feelings, because he surely had his heart broken. The other part of me was mute with fury.

"If you choose to continue to dislike him, Doctor, I cannot stop you. But please know that I have complete trust in Bruno, as I do you. And that I take every moment I may spend with him to be a most precious gift. The moments in between are still richer for anticipating our next liaison."

"Having a lover who flits in and out of your life with the understanding that it is not as important as his political activity seems a monstrous compromise," I asserted.

"How many women in this city are in a similar situation, and question it not, and we count them to be exemplary wives?" He smiled around his pipe at the comparison between himself and a woman. "Whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, Watson, an occasional male companions is by far the safest thing for both Bruno and myself. And you, since your virility could be questioned at this point as well."

"What do you mean?" I scoffed. "Everyone knows me as your friend, and my frequently scandalized expression at what I hear from the denizens of these haunts establishes me as an outsider."

"To those inside these elite circles, you are, of course, a friend, Watson, but to someone from the outside, you are indistinguishable from the other males avidly seeking each other's company. I sometimes worry about what a raid would do to you, who have done no wrong."

"And neither have you," I said hotly. "Please let me take care of my own affairs, Holmes as you manage yours with no thought to my preferences. Even before I met you I have always liked the artistic temperament, and meeting some of these well-known figures is a unique opportunity."

This time, the wound Sherlock Holmes inflicted upon me was far deeper, as his dissembling had lasted much longer than a drunken afternoon in a foreign land. As when his capacity to love asserted itself, I found myself regarding this man I saw almost every day as if for the first time.

Two competing hypotheses asserted themselves, and my inability to settle on one or the other was tearing me apart.

The first possibility was that Holmes was telling the truth. That every moment of agony I experienced along with him as he mourned Bruno was a cleverly concocted fiction. Knowing my deep level of friendly concern, not to mention my doctor's desire to heal, Holmes must have been aware that tricking me into thinking his heart was broken was something that isn't done in polite society. Crying out in pain on the street in order to gain a helpful stranger's sympathy is in poor taste. But using a similarly mercenary scheme on a close confidante for over a year….

Holmes could very well have done this to me. His passion for Bruno is so great that I believe him capable of nearly anything to help his lover—in this case, to make their affair seem definitively ended.

When I thought this way, I nursed a quiet fury for Sherlock Holmes and all his arbitrary ways.

But then there was the other possibility. Many of the details were the same, with one exception: Holmes didn't understand the movements of his own emotions well enough that he found it more convenient to wipe away all those months of unhappiness after Bruno abandoned him. It was easier for the great detective to be the author of a plot, than to have been jilted like one of the dance-hall boys we occasionally saw dashing out of the gentleman's salons in tears.

If my friend was still the specialist studying plankton while the great icebergs of his feeling floated by him unnoticed, it would not be very kind of me to react in anger. His family had some tendency to being dispassionate, and the poor man had been thrust into infatuation with little preparation.


	6. Chapter 6

For several weeks, I must have seemed brooding, if not sulky. With his usual matter-of-fact manner, the detective tempted me with all kinds of interesting puzzles, but my mind was already engaged with a battle for Holmes' soul. That he would find such an idea ridiculous merely made it more difficult for me to talk to him.

I took to avoiding our rooms when I expected him to be there. I breakfasted much earlier. My luncheon was nearly always packed in my trusty old tiffin carrier from India, a mixture of whatever Mrs. Hudson had on hand that day.

This went on for some time, and then I had one of those days at the surgery.

Usually Holmes treated my practice with some derision, as if I merely dispensed remedies for headache or stomach upset, sleeplessness or a lethargy that might be due to a deficiency of some sort. He was right about one thing: the enormous number of human ailments have too few explanation and even fewer real treatments. That is hardly my fault, and any General Practitioner will agree that his function is part-counselor and part-healer. We see many women who are misused in the most creative and inhumane manner—it was in following through to the police with one of these cases that I first met Sherlock Holmes.

On this particular day, a series of sad events had their culmination. They had started a fortnight ago, when a woman consulted me about some gastric distress. As I palpated her abdomen, I came across a distinct, large and very hard lump—approximately the site of the right Fallopian tube.

"Oh don't mind that, Doctor. I've had it for years and it's never bothered me. Something else is making me queasy after meals, please believe me."

My training kept my face impassive. "No doubt, madam. If you wouldn't mind answering some more questions about your digestion."

And so I mixed in questions about what was probably gastritis with my inquiries into this very abnormal growth. She had had it since before she was married, it had never caused any pain. She had never had any children with her husband, but he had received an injury as a soldier that had made his ability to sire children very doubtful.

"We've taken my little niece in and are very happy, Doctor. Can you give me a syrup or something?"

In my smoothest voice I convinced her that a very healthy married lady of thirty who had never had children should always consult a specialist to see if, perchance, the problem lay with her.

My relationships with various specialists around the city are excellent, and I waited to hear what this expert in women's ailments might discover. When I had no word from him, I feared the worst and decided to drop by his surgery.

"Yes, Dr. Watson, it was a very serious matter," the man agreed. "The woman had been pregnant at a young age—an ectopic pregnancy that, lucky for her, expire early on. Otherwise we both know a pregnancy growing outside the womb can burst through everything in its path and be fatal."

"The material stayed where it was and calcified," I guessed. "I've heard of some similar cases, and certainly hoped for this woman's sake that it was not a malignant growth. How large do you estimate it to be?"

"Estimate it? I've removed it. Four inches long. It could easily have caused a fatal rupture at any moment."

"How did she fare through the surgery? I assume you did a complete hysterectomy," I asked. Such operations were only to be done as a last resort, as the patient did not always pull through.

The specialist spread his hands. "These things are not for us to predict. She is a strong specimen. Her husband is the one I should think would drop of apoplexy when he found out."

"Found out?"

"The husband is unable to have children. I could show you the diagram I made of the wound he received, but there is no doubt he has been destined not to sire offspring since he received an unlucky musket-blast at 19."

My heart sank. "You told the husband that you were removing the remains of a pregnancy that couldn't possibly be his."

"And he took it extremely ill," the specialist said. "I gave him some drops for his nerves, but he still hasn't been in to see the patient."

I emerged onto Harley Street as if I was the one who'd sustained the musket-blast. My feet took me on an aimless walk while I tried to reassure myself it was not my fault.

Firstly, there was no way to predict that the patient would have someday had a rupture. Most of the similar cases have come to light during an autopsy, and the women were utterly unaware of the calcium deposit. What if I hadn't made the referral? What if the specialist had a scrap of decency, and knew to layer his diagnosis over with so much Latin that neither husband nor wife were aware of what was being removed?

All I could think was of this cheerful woman lying in hospital, with no guarantee she would leave alive, and no husband by her side to comfort her. He might leave her entirely over this secret that had been growing very slowly, just under the surface of their happy life, and might never have interfered if left alone.

When I returned to Baker Street this way, full of unanswerable questions, Holmes was often very kind. He listened carefully to the cases that got under my skin, often with a tinge of respect. The sleuth had his collection of failures that haunted him, it is true, but he is at least armed with a splendid mind that can wrest clues from the most varied places.

But in medicine, not even a genius can see directly into every secret working of the flesh. No one can foresee which day a fit will overtake an ostensibly healthy man and have him carried out of his house, never to return. But the doctor is the one who will have to muster up some sort of answer for the bereaved.

And so to return to my story, I was in a sad state when I entered our quarters, and yet still very wary about confiding in my roommate. Without his even looking at me, I knew my worries were registered and filed in the precise catalogue that inhabits Holmes' brain. He called for dinner and we sat across from each other in silence for some time, punctuated by a few comments from him on some case.

Finally, the offer was made, as many were rejected in the past two months: "I'm going out this evening and wondered if you would like to join me." A silence. "It's that arty set you so favor." Silence. "There will be cards, for those who desire such amusement."

A good turn at the card table was exactly what I needed to forget. "I wouldn't mind some gambling," I allowed. "Actors are sometimes the very worst at hiding their reaction to a good hand."

"It's settled, then," my friend said in a tone I could only take as pleased.

We readied ourselves for the outing with a veneer of friendliness over the rifts that had happened in the past months.

Beginning with this chance outing, I was to become close friends with Mr. Dougan MacLeod, whose name will doubtless be familiar to you as a playwright, director and impresario of the most diverse entertainment, ranging from the classical (his Antigone was named production of the year in 1886) to biting satire about our times. His real preference, I found out, is more fanciful fare. As Mr. MacLeod confided to me, his only allegiance is to the imagination, and when he has written or directed something even he does not understand, he feels he has truly done his job.

"Why, Dr. Watson, I have been wanting to meet you!" was the way this celebrated personage greeted me when he happened to join our group at the private room in Oswald's Restaurant. This surprised me a great deal, since why would the director of all the theatrical productions that I admire most have heard of me?

"It's true, Watson," Holmes called over the table. "Something literary, was all I gathered."

MacLeod was a little shorter than me, the sort of build that an acrobat or dancer would have. He later admitted he had trained for the stage himself, but became so frustrated with his directors that he decided he could do a better job. He had dark hair in a pronounced widow's peak, and was early forties, older than Holmes and me, and seemingly older still because he had done so many things and seemed to be everywhere in the city at once.

Everyone wanted to know Dougan MacLeod, everyone wanted to be cast by him, have their play produced. I'd always heard that he was exclusive in his relations, but nothing could be further from the truth. If a work or a person evoked something for the director, he would support them to the ends of the earth, no matter what the critics said.

That's what he had done for his lover. Adam Fairlie. An actor of about my age—mid thirties—known for his violent moods and torrid love affairs. And for being the sort of player who could evoke the most profound silence simply by walking across the stage. In one celebrated case, his only line in a scene was "indeed" and when he uttered it at a near-whisper, two women fainted in the audience. No, he had real talent, which is what Mackie discerned when he cast the unknown Yorkshire lad as his Hamlet. This provoked such outrage among the actors queuing for the role that the young Adam had to be kept quite sequestered during rehearsals.

"I felt responsible for this impulsive decision, you see, since I knew the competition was fierce," Dougan explained to me over whiskey. "What if I had only let this young man in for a beating in an alley and one of my poorly reviewed disasters? And so I took him under my wing, kept him with the language coach—his accent was atrocious—and had only the idea of keeping the boy hard at work and safe until we opened."

"From the audience I had realized that Adam Fairlie was an extraordinary actor, but now I see that in person he is, if anything more impressive." This I said to Dougan while watching my new acquaintance's eyes follow his lover around the room. This private parlor for smoking, drinking and the occasional card game contained the most varied examples of men—fresh-faced chorus boys and florid-faced middle-aged men. Adam preferred them a bit younger, I noticed.

He faced me to say in a calm tone, "You see, we fell in together, Adam and I, and have never fully fallen apart. I'm sure you've heard the gossip about cleverly arranged affairs with women that fall apart too quickly because of his temper, so the papers say." He watched Adam pose with his hand lightly on another man's arm. "The other affairs, the ones you don't hear about, are tolerable. He always comes back."

The man appeared to realize that he had just been talking on an intimate basis with a relative stranger.

"Forgive me, Doctor. I have been wanting to speak to you, but not to subject you to my troubles. Have you ever thought of making a play out of one of your stories?"

"Why, no," I said, surprised. "Plays are flights of fancy, they're not tales of crime that cannot be altered. You don't work in the service of truth, but of beauty."

This visage I had seen in the papers many times was looking at me very seriously. "Oh pardon, I do not wish to disparage your work," I amended.

"No, not at all. I was merely thinking of whether the truth could survive under the footlights." His eyes were shining. "We have much time to speak about it. First, what did you think of the mystery play that I've had running the last few months."

I had seen it twice, so the answer came quickly. "The actress who played Miss Judy was marvelous, I thought, and that moment when the crescendo happens and the proof that her fiancé had been planning to add her murder to his list of crimes I found very moving."

He nodded impatiently. "And? Please be frank, from one writer to another."

It burst from me before I could think. "You can't possibly get to Surrey in the amount of time you allotted. That type of gun is entirely too small to guarantee piercing the sternum at the distance from which it was fired. The young Cockney lass Lottie was a pretty good example of the coarse language that might be used by a laundress, but sometimes she used words that didn't fit. And conversely, the duchess character made a scathing pun about Judy. 'You're no better than your name,' or something to that effect. But in my experience, a member of nobility would be very unlikely to know that Cockney term for a woman of ill fame."

My words sputtered out. I glanced at the red face across from me. "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. MacLeod, I only wished to show you that I pay very close attention to your works, but I had no right—"

"It is a travesty that none of those things ever occurred to me," Dougan said. "My scripts will be amended presently! I'd much rather hear these things from a fellow writer, Dr. Watson, than emblazoned across the _Times_!"

My thought was still that I should make a hasty retreat but the director brought us fresh drinks. "I had a strong feeling you would be insightful, and my intuition is rarely wrong. Come to my rehearsals around town. The type of show doesn't matter. I feel I need a new perspective on what I do, and perhaps you will gain insight on your own writing. Once one becomes relatively successful, it becomes difficult to find someone who will speak to you honestly, and that is when the artistic spark goes elsewhere."

As I said, I've always had a fascination for the stage, but this was the first time anyone had ever treated me as a "fellow artist" and drawn me into the interior of his work. It seemed too good to be true, since I was a mere chronicler. After all, wasn't Holmes the one who should be congratulated for solving his cases?

"No, the story is in the telling," Dougan admonished me when I brought this up. "What is Hamlet, after all, but a peevish lad who's been had out of a crown by his mother of dubious virtue? No, you bring something to your works. Haven't you told me Mr. Holmes sometimes objects to your composition?"

I laughed wryly. "Frequently he differs with what I think is important. He doesn't understand that a tale written to his specifications would be quite dull."

"Precisely!" Mackie exclaimed. At that Adam Fairlie glanced in our direction but not for long. "You make choices, certain things you leave out. Imagine taking the heart of an adventure, one about a murder, or a jewel theft, and changing nearly all the details. It is entirely possible to do this, and still retain the essence of the story, if the author chooses."

I heard him, but at that moment I saw Holmes laying his hand on a handsome young man's arm. Knowing what I know now about Bruno's continued place in my comrade's affections, I wondered whether I should warn the nice-looking chap that it was all a charade with Sherlock Holmes. Everything he did was in the service of some grand stratagem to protect his mate.

Suddenly I felt Mr. MacLeod's eyes following my gaze after my friend. "I've coincided with Mr. Holmes three times recently, and I was disappointed you were not with him," he said.

"Mr. Holmes and I have divergent interests at times," I said flatly.

"I know what the company of a difficult man is like." Mackie chuckled. "Please don't think I was implying anything."

"No," I laughed. "You would not be the first to be confused about my romantic predilections, at any rate. It has been necessary to put some people aright, one of Holmes' madams, for one."

"He has madams?" MacLeod was enchanted. We talked for even longer over drinks, while I shared some Sherlockian peculiarities. At one point I looked around—the cards had started without my noticing.

"Forgive me, Doctor, for keeping you from the tables," Dougan began. "I was perhaps a bit too eager to hear more about your friend because—I do hope you don't mind. That is, I wished to discuss a sort of partnership with you. I'm creating a character and it has a little to do with your Mr. Holmes."

All the friendliness that had grown up between us began to fall flat. I should have known no famous personage would wish to speak with me. "Perhaps the first person you should discuss this with is Sherlock Holmes." The detective was whispering to some man near the card tables, doubtless showing off his ability to predict the plays.

"Let me explain my artistic process." This was interesting enough to draw me back to my conversation with the impresario. "I take something, a little piece of grit, something I like very well or don't like at all. It stays with me, sometimes for a long time, and if it's nurtured correctly, it becomes a character. Would it make you feel better to know that this character would be a woman?"

I burst out laughing. "A feminine Holmes? Impossible."

"This idea that began it all, the little piece of grit, was something very small Mr. Holmes said or did, I won't say what it was. No doubt it would mean little to you, Dr. Watson, but it's been growing in me." Dougan tapped his forehead. "I should like a few more details, but you will scarcely recognize the result, should it ever make it to stage."

"But a woman?" I protested.

He shrugged. "There is no place on the West End for all the people I see," he gestured around the room, "So some of them become women. Would you be surprised to learn that my Arlette, the most famous of my dramatic heroines, started out as a man?"

"And the lady-Holmes' romantic interest will be based on Bruno, I take it."

MacLeod's attitude became cautious. "We will see if there is a romance, but they will be involved in some way. Bruno is a very arresting man. Very deep, unknowable perhaps. I was studying him quite closely one evening, along with Holmes, when the Italian gave me a distinct chill just with a look. That was when I thought it would be a bit safer to consult with you."

"Bruno is extremely possessive," I agreed. "But I'm still not sure Holmes characteristics are mine to give away."

"Come to a rehearsal," he said, reaching to touch my sleeve. "I can help your work and you can help mine."

His eyes had never ceased following Adam's movements, and he arose. "Until very soon, I hope, Dr. Watson," he bowed.

With his card in my pocket, I joined one of the tables.

The card game commenced, and I remember I was rather lucky. Perhaps it was because I was so thrilled to have met my theatrical idol that I didn't try very hard to win.

The first time I arrived at one of Mackie's rehearsals, I half-expected he would have forgotten the invitation. But no, I was sat in the front by his side, and thus I watched many of his plays in all stages of production. He soon had me reading pages of dialogue as he was composing scenes because I had traveled the most varied neighborhoods with Holmes and had a very good ear for high and low society. He also allowed me to witness the incredible hubbub behind the scenes as the last bits of paint went on before the curtain rose.

All of this had me see my writing in a new way. But perhaps most importantly for this tale, it was Mackie's suggestions about changing the details while leaving the heart of the story intact that allowed me to write about the princess' ear without bringing about the downfall of one of Europe's royal houses.


	7. Chapter 7

Whenever Mackie and I were together it was an intensely creative experience. People said the director and I spoke in our own language at times, but also, the actors relied upon me to translate some of his obscure instructions which, if misunderstood, could provoke a very loud, very artistic exit from my friend.

The reader might think that I spent all my time in the theatre district, but I kept up my practice and still assisted Holmes with cases, and everything was much more interesting now that I had such an intelligent listener. The following eight months were a very productive time for Holmes as well. When Bruno came back briefly, I tried to arrange for Dougan to join the three of us and discreetly observe the couple upon whom some characters might someday be based.

Occasionally Dougan, Holmes and I would meet up in one of those specialized clubs. That was the main place where I might coincide with the great Adam Fairlie. I did attend a dress rehearsal for a show where he played the lead, but even when I tried to speak to the man, he looked through me more than at me.

"Don't take Adam very seriously," Dougan advised me. "I'm here to keep him happy, and as long as I do, any literary friends are entirely too dull for his attention."

Over the months my curiosity about this arrangement grew and grew. One evening we were walking together out of a late rehearsal seeking a restaurant that was still open. I gave voice to my confusion about wonder why my universally liked friend adhered so faithfully to this spotty relationship with a man who was beneath him, in my opinion.

"It is not my place to say, Mackie, but Adam seems to be rather selfish. While you do let your Scottish temper loose when an actress fouls her lines, I have else ways seen you to be the soul of generosity with everyone."

"Ah," he sighed. "When you've loved someone for a long time you can't get rid of them without lopping off part of yourself."

No establishments seemed to be open so he gestured towards his flat nearby, where at least there were cold dishes and decent wine.

On the way, Dougan continued talking about his relationship. "The first time I saw Adam stride across the stage, I knew he would be a singular figure in my life," he admitted. "He hurts me in a way I need, I think sometimes. As for right now, he is in the arms of his ballerino of the visiting Russian corps. It wounds me, Watson," he said as we topped the stairs and entered his rooms. "I hope you know me well enough to see beyond my pleasant manners. It knifes at my heart that he is with someone else!"

I had been in his flat one or two times before, both times with Holmes, and we agreed that it was done in perfect taste without being oppressively fine. My host laid out a few plates and some wine, but he seemed to regret his confidences to me, and we ate in silence.

"Dr. Watson, there are a few inconveniences about being friends with a medical man," he said when we were through.

"There are? I immobilized the sprained ankle of one of your actresses," I said, somewhat hurt.

He made a calming gesture and then said in a mischievous tone, "There are excesses in which I should not like to indulge in front of you, but I am very much in need of a calmative."

He had been inching towards a cabinet and brought out a hashish pipe.

I laughed. "Holmes makes no secret of his liking for the stuff. Do what you like in your own home. Although," here I twinkled, "You may find I am much more worldly than I seem about intoxicants. My travels have shown me a great deal."

"Would you care to join me, Doctor?" He pulled out a packet of the strong-smelling stuff. "I have not yet tried this batch, but I have it on good authority that it is most pure."

After my show of bravado, I found myself a little nervous to take up the pipe. "Give me a moment to consider," I requested.

Dougan smoked a portion and at first, we were merely talking about one of the plays he was writing. At some point I realized that he was looking at me in a very odd manner that made me curious about what he was thinking, but he didn't answer my questions.

There was only one thing for it. I took up the pipe because I simply had to know why my well-mannered host was gazing at me as if I were the most fascinatingly strange thing he'd ever seen.

Deftly, he prepared a portion for me and I smoked, not expecting much more to happen than with a normal tobacco pipe or a drink. After all, Holmes indulged for entire days, so he told me when he came back moving slowly and sweetly for a man usually all sharp edges.

Then I began telling my friend how the cannabis is thought to affect the organism, since it obviously wasn't affecting me. Dougan listened, hanging on my very word. And then he began speaking very clearly:

_In Xanadu did Kubla Khan _

_A stately pleasure-dome decree: _

Naturally Coleridge's opium-fueled poem had always seemed the height of romance for me, but I had never consciously memorized it. Yet, in that strange moment, I found myself reciting:

_Where Alph, the sacred river, ran _

_Through caverns measureless to man_

_Down to a sunless sea…_

_But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted _

_Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!_

_A savage place! as holy and enchanted _

_As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted…_

Then we began heaping words upon words, from all sorts of poets, as if we were famished for understanding and we had finally found it with this miraculous stranger. For I could have sworn Dougan looked entirely new to me.

It was simply an overflowing of our delight in each other's company. For it happened so easily when I took him by the hand, the better to know him, and his hand poised upon my face, the better to hold me steady, and then our mouths found each other and it was the best thing I had felt in years.

Every intent word that had passed between us was suddenly back in our mouths with a new taste revealed. It was a taste that must have been there every time we spoke—and we spoke often!—but it had been hovering there, waiting to be noticed. I leaned back for a moment because I had the dizzying sensation that I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut.

My eyes finally focused. There was Dougan, but his eyes had gone dark. Then I caught him by the waist and leaned him backwards on the sofa, against the overstuffed arm. His face then began to empty of a tension that seemed a cruel thing I would never wish on him, what must have been a fear that I regretted what were doing. Strangely, I thought of the way I have removed snake venom from someone bitten in Afghanistan as I used my mouth to remove any doubts on his part, for I had none. And then I was pressing everything I was to his likewise everything. I knew nothing for some time except with whom I was doing it.

The story goes that our hands were lost in each other's clothes when—

"Well, isn't this a tidy bundle," came a low voice that could make women faint with a whispered word.

"Adam," Dougan pulled both of us up to a sitting position. "I thought you would be away for another week at least." Since the two kept separate quarters for show, this flat was not the only place where the actor might come to lay his head.

"I didn't think this one was a threat. And now I see he's been biding his time. What they've said about him and that detective is true, I told you!" Adam's voice was by now loud enough to reach the back rows.

"Be quiet," Dougan pleaded. Then he turned to me, "I'm sorry, John, truly I am—"

Suddenly I felt much closer to sober and I had my coat and hat in hand. "Good night," I said with many things hidden in that phrase, and then I was gone.

It seemed best to give Dougan some time to sort things out, so I vowed to avoid his company. Three days later he showed up at my surgery just as I was locking up.

"May I have a word?" he asked, and I let us back in.

"You know I can't leave him."

I nodded.

"I've got my Heathcliff, and it's not something a passionate temperament can wean himself from so easily." He looked at me closely. "I fear that all I would bring to you would be a similar tempest, with nothing but destruction in its wake."

"I think a tempest is exactly what I need," I said throatily, mastering the urge to take his hand.

He smiled. "I see that now. I had thought that we were both too easygoing to make a match. But you have plenty of heat in you, Doctor. More than enough to make our way together." He paused. "Which is something I would very much like to do. For now, however, I need to live the life I have chosen, so we must not see each other."

My mouth closed on his, so that I might know what it was like to meet thus, with no intoxicant blurring the sensation.

Then I let him out on the street.

Surprisingly, Holmes brought up the subject later that evening when we were in the middle of trying out ways to suspend a man from the ceiling such that he could escape—as we believed one of Holmes' cases had done.

"Your escapade has made tongues wag, Watson," he grunted while trying to wriggle out of my knots. "I heard from Giorgio's café, and the news can't have stopped there."

"My—oh. It was nothing. A side effect from that infernal hashish I was right to warn you about."

"Hm," was his only response. Holmes was able to wrest himself free this time before I insisted he right himself lest he rupture something. The whole time he was struggling the detective was examining me with a peculiar regard.

The next morning at breakfast, I found several books littering my side of the table. Holmes sometimes did this when he'd found a solution to a problem, or at least the next step. For some reason, my roommate had placed several medical treatises about the effects of intoxicants, specifically cannabis, on the human system.

"Most amusing, Holmes," I said as he joined me at table. "What I smoked was hardly enough to have any of the serious effects like distractibility I see in you after a binge. I had only one preparation, and it couldn't have been the entire portion."

"Precisely," he said with an ironic twist of his lip. Then he gave a savage tap to his egg and the demonstration was over.

A few days later I sat down to another breakfast table strewn with heavy tomes.

"What is this?" I inquired.

Holmes gazed at me over his coffee cup. "It occurred to me that I was making inferences without adequate information. To that end, I procured some of the same material you had smoked. I am relieved I took no more than I did—more paint would have been brushed beyond the easels and onto the wall."

"You were so enthused?" I tried to imagine an intoxicated Sherlock Holmes daubing paint on his walls.

He gave a wry smile. "It seems that your sample was contaminated with another substance possessing mild hallucinogenic properties. As a doctor you should know that unwholesome habits can bring their own punishment."

"I unwittingly ingested something similar in India," I said off-handedly. "My fellow soldiers and I had a fascinating night that none of us remember."

Holmes' eyebrow inched up.

"Which consisted of nothing other than getting expelled from the establishment that sold us the drink, and spending the rest of the night crawling around in the dirt outside to the hilarity of the neighborhood. If any of us had fallen asleep in each other's arms, we would have dozens of witnesses at our court martial. As it was we were merely a cautionary tale for ordering one of the local intoxicant mixtures."

I reached for the coffee pot and said mildly, "Of course there was something else in the hashish, Holmes. Any doctor would realize that fact after the effects wore off."

He looked at me intently, not expecting my grasp of the situation.

"What are you offering me with these?" I gestured to the scientific treatises on drugs and fungi. "Proof to have on hand if my scandal were to reach the papers? An alibi to satisfy my own conscience? You, Holmes, you need an explanation for everything. Me, I want for none."

Sherlock Holmes looked nonplussed. It sat oddly on his face.

"In the next few weeks, however, your friendship and possibly your professional assistance will be most welcome," I said more kindly.

The great detective looked at me like an insect during that time. No, that is perhaps unkind. He was trying to understand how I could accept the understanding of my impossible situation so calmly. For no message came from Dougan, and the men's clubs were full of the news of his reconciliation with Adam.

But at the same time, Holmes was collecting the abundant infamies about Mr. Adam Fairlie, should the latter try to retaliate against me by leaking some information to the papers. It would not be the first time that one member of that secret sect had taken down another out of rage.

Thankfully, there is some honor in this hidden world I now belonged to. Mr. Fairlie contented himself with sowing discord among Dougan's casts and, so I hear, carrying on a few affairs rather more obviously with my friend's humiliation in mind.

Holmes dragged me to all the right places—both secret lairs and public venues—to establish that I had nothing to hide. The cold shoulder I received when accompanying Holmes to our habitual cafes and my preferred card games was difficult, but then there were also at least as many who disliked Adam Fairlie and sympathized with my predicament.

All of this was nothing for me, nothing. I was able to see how curious it was that a few perfect minutes in time—that would never repeat in the future—could have such an effect upon Mackie and me.

Naturally, I kept writing. Sometimes I sent sketches towards a play to Dougan—each with a different pseudonym—my only bow to the desire to be close to him The third sketch was returned with a note. "John: I enjoyed this play even more than the other two. I've passed it on to Alistair—you know, the young director I told you that seems like he might turn into something good. Perhaps he will be interested in producing it. I wasn't wrong about you—you're growing into a playwright. I remain, ever yours, Dougan MacLeod."

There was no transgression to be found in the message, but I fancied a private regard behind what was ostensibly a rejection. Whatever species of peace I felt after our brief assignation managed to last for a year and a half.

Then one day, without warning, Dougan MacLeod was at Baker Street.

Holmes and I had been in the midst of a spirited discussion about a case. When Mrs. Hudson announced the director, we stood there a moment, regarding each other.

When I looked around, Holmes was gone, his pipe smoking on the hearth.

"If I said I left him," Dougan began.

"I'd ask you for how long."

"And if I said until the production began on my new comedy?"

I calculated for a moment. "That wouldn't be for at least 4 months."

He smiled. "You would have gleaned that from the papers. I kept track of you as well. That case with the ancient coins left you with a stab wound to the leg, I recall."

"It was nothing." I stood there stupidly for a moment and then remembered my manners. "Please, sit." Dougan looked around from his choice of chairs. "You've never been here," I said in wonder.

He shook his head. "I have many times. In your chronicles, and in my imagination."

This reference to one of our old favorite topics gave us an opening. We talked of writing, and also of this attempt at a more fair arrangement with Adam.

Mrs. Hudson brought tea, regarding my unusual animation with one of her looks. When she came to collect the tray, the look was even more pronounced. After she left, Dougan said, "One of the conditions is that unfortunately my flat is impossible—you understand why. Adam could never countenance you there."

"As you may have gathered from her inquisitive glances, Mrs. Hudson is equally impossible. She sees everything and, well, there's no one else who would tolerate all the strange habits Holmes and I subject her to. I can't jeopardize our place here, any more than Holmes could."

My ardor burned, yet there we sat. There we were, two grown men, with nowhere to make up for lost time. I laughed at our miserable lot. "You said it took all this time to show Adam that he cannot leave you for months at a time without allowing you a similar freedom. It has me picturing him throwing stones at Mrs. Hudson's windows and bellowing for you from the street."

"Anything is possible, I'm afraid," Dougan said sadly.

I took his hand.

We went to Treacher's.

Dougan and I stood there very quietly as the unsavory tavern-keeper looked us over.

Treacher reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a red chit. He took his stylographic pen and wrote some mishmash that Holmes claimed was a code, telling the people at the hotels that we were to be trusted. Then he instructed, "Go to Derbyshire's Inn. You know it?"

I nodded. It was one of the ones I'd approached when trailing Holmes, so long ago. "Now, the doctor should go first, as many will know you Mr. MacLeod." The tavern-keeper gave an unctuous bow. "You, sir, go to the door you'll find on the east side, where there's more cover. Bring a newspaper if you like. A porter will let you in presently."

"Thank you, Mr. Treacher," I said, scarcely able to remember how much I loathed him. "Can you play the role of a newspaper-reading vagrant?" I asked my lover, taking his hand for all to see.

He kissed me. No one took any note. Not even Treacher, who was bawling at someone to bring up another cask of ale.

We stood there for a moment in our princely domain and then left separately. We walked on opposite sides of the street and he let me go in ahead.

The concierge took my chit folded in my payment and soon I was in a small room that seemed even smaller when Dougan joined me.

The perfect conformity of our selves surprised me not at all, not after this long being sure. This was the person most worthy of my affections, and I bestowed them upon him generously. When we were lying in each other's arms I did think, "Now I understand why Holmes does not worry about the future with Bruno." For I cared not at all what happened to me after that sojourn should end.

"Why are you smiling?" Dougan asked.

"I am at the center of my story, with my Heathcliff." His eyes clouded. "For as long as I can have you, I'll have you."

They had to discreetly knock at the door to advise us of the time. Apparently an entire night is not usually offered.

He and I arranged to meet in a late-night spot favorable to our kind. We had bread and wine and said very little.

"I have a stake in a house in the country. Let's go away as soon as possible," he came out with suddenly.

And we did. My previous romances paled in comparison to our state of near-starvation for each other. "You are the one mistake I have ever made," he told me from the blessed privacy of the country house. "You seemed to be so easy. But I was very wrong about my John." He ran a hand down my back. "You have plenty to say for yourself."

My new satisfied laugh was my only response.

We did go on to collaborate on plays. My frequent presence backstage and during rehearsals was something Adam Fairlie chose to ignore once more—he being far too interested in himself and his projects to work on scenes with Dougan.

When I married, as I always imagined I would, it was to someone who could be trusted with my secret life. A woman who could understand that Dougan and I would not try to take anything from each other's lives, as long as we could occasionally have time together. My abiding love for the best man I ever knew took nothing away from her. Mackie is unfailingly considerate, and my dear Aimee understood this after meeting him. If anything, I could feel more peaceful, knowing that Adam would treat Mackie more kindly, with me more occupied.

This collection of scarlet tales is to be opened only after my children's children are of age to read it. For some reason, it matters to me that my grandchildren should know me to be someone who loved passionately—they who can't be hurt by my relations the way my children would have been. My aspect has never been very prepossessing—even Dougan thought I was more of an observer than an actor on life's stage, at first. But with the love of a good man, I became the man I always was. There is no doubt that I would have been more fulfilled if we could have spent all our time together, but his pledge to Adam predated me and I had no right to demand its dissolution.

You see, reader, I was so excited about writing this story that perforce remained a secret to all but a few, that I skipped far ahead in my narrative. Rest assured that the next story will handle time in a more orderly fashion.


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